Ill CERCERIS BUPRESTICIDA 43 



three and four displayed their gold and emerald. I could 

 not believe my eyes. But that was only the prelude to my 

 feast. In the chaos caused by my own exhumations a 

 Hymenopteron appeared and was taken by me ; it was the 

 captor of the Buprestis, trying to escape from amid her 

 victims. I recognised an old acquaintance, a Cerceris 

 which I have found some two hundred times in Spain and 

 around Saint Sever. 



But my ambition was far from satisfied. It was not 

 enough to know ravisher and prey : I wanted the larva for 

 which all this rich store was laid up. After exhausting 

 the first vein of Buprestis I hastened to make new excava- 

 tions. Digging down more carefully I finally discovered 

 two larvae, which completed the good fortune of this cam- 

 paign. In less than an hour I turned over three haunts of 

 the Cerceris, and my booty was some fifteen whole Buprestids 

 with fragments of a yet greater number. I calculated, and 

 I believe it fell far short of the truth, that there were 

 twenty-five nests in this garden, a fact representing an 

 immense number of buried Buprestids. What must it be, 

 I said to myself, in localities where in a few hours I have 

 caught as many as sixty Cerceris on blossoming garlic, 

 with nests most probably near, and no doubt provisioned 

 quite as abundantly ! Imagination, backed by probability, 

 showed me underground, within a small space, B. bifasciata 

 by thousands, although I who have observed the ento- 

 mology of our parts for over thirty years have never 

 noticed a single one. Once only, perhaps twenty years 

 ago, did I see, sticking in a hole of an ancient oak, the 

 abdomen and elytra of this insect. This fact was a ray of 

 light, for it told me that the larva of B. bifasciata must live 

 in the wood of the oak, and entirely explained the abun- 

 dance of this beetle in a district where the forests consist 

 chiefly of that tree. As Cerceris bupresticida is rare on the 

 clayey hills of the latter stretch of country compared to the 

 sandy plains where grows Pinus maritima, it became an 

 interesting question whether this Hymenopteron when it 

 inhabits the pine region provisions its nest as it does in 



