184 THE SOLITARY WASPS. 



As the fruit of that day's labor we saw twenty-six assassins 

 capture and poinard as many victims, and with their actions as 

 a basis we may assert that the wasp very commonly stings her 

 prey twice, first at the moment of capture and again after she 

 has alighted near by, and that the method of operation gives her 

 every opportunity for the exercise of any skill that she may 



Having failed then in our plan of studying Pelopaens under 

 artificial conditions, and having met with only a moderate de- 

 gree of success in watching the wasps out of doors, we found 

 ourselves obliged to rely mainly upon a third method, that of 

 studying the condition of as many of the spiders as we could 

 gather, in the hope of deciding whether these wasps are so won- 

 derfully skilful as they are reported to be, or whether they are 

 novices in the art of paralyzing their prey. To the layman the 

 results of a surgeon's work are much more important than the 

 method of his procedure, and the test of his skill is the per- 

 centage of recoveries among his patients. Since the wasp, then, 

 has been held up as an adept in the art of producing paralysis 

 without death, we thought it fair to adopt a similar test with 

 her, and so we set for ourselves the task of examining spiders 

 from the cells of Pelopaens, to see how many were killed at 

 the moment of capture, or were so much injured that they died 

 shortly after, and how many had been stung with such discrim- 

 ination as to preserve them for many days alive, but motionless, 

 a store of fresh food for the larv^a of the wasp. It may be 

 urged that dead spiders serve this purpose as well as living ones, 

 but this is a separate question. The point to be first determined 

 is whether the instinct to sting a certain place is much or little 

 developed in these wasps. 



"We examined in all five hundred and seventy-three cells. Of 

 these, forty had been freshly sealed up with the egg just laid, 

 or were still open, the process of storing not having been com- 

 pleted. Under these circumstances the spidei*s were from one 

 to three days old and gave valuable information as to the point 



