>04 



PSYCHE. 



[November 1895. 



into the air. There nre usually two or 

 three unmated males flying about in the 

 neighborhood of the nests, poking their 

 he:ids into unused holes, and occasion- 

 ally trying to enter one that is occupied, 

 but never so far as we have seen, with 

 any success, the male in charge being 

 always quite ready and able to take care 

 of his rights. The males, however, 

 never made any objection when strange 

 females entered the nest as they some- 

 times did by mistake, nor did the females 

 object to the entrance of a strange 

 m.ile when the one belonging to the 

 nest happened to be away, but in such 

 cases the riglitfui owner, on his return, 

 quickly ejected the intruder. We often 

 amused ourselves, while we were watch- 

 ing the nests, by approaching the little 

 male, as he stood in iiis doorway, with 

 a bl.ide of grass. He alwaj's attacked 

 it valiantlv, and sometimes grasped it 

 so tightly in his mandibles that he could 

 be drawn out of the nest with it. 



When the female returns to the nest 

 with a spider the male flies out to make 

 wav for her, and then as she goes in he 

 alights on her back ami enters with her. 

 When she conies out again she biings 

 him with herj hut he at once re-enters, 

 and then, after a moment, comes out 

 and backs in, so that he faces outward 

 as before. 



In one instance, with rubrocinctiim, 

 where the work of storing the nest had 

 been delayed liv rainy weather, we saw 

 the male assisting bv taking the spiders 

 fiom the female as she brought them 

 and packing them into tlie nest leaving 

 her free to hunt for more. This was 



an especially attentive little fellow, as 

 he guarded the nest almost continuously 

 for four days, the female sometimes be- 

 ing gone tor hours at a time. On the 

 last day he even revisited tlie nest three 

 or four times after it had been sealed 

 up. 



It is upon the female that the heaviest 

 part of the work devolves. As soon as 

 she has put the nest in order she begins 

 the arduous task of catching spiders 

 wherewith to store it. It usually takes 

 them from ten to twentv minutes to find 

 a spider and bring it home, but they 

 are sometimes absent for a much longer 

 time. When the spider has been carried 

 to the nest the process of packing it in 

 begins. This occupies some time and, 

 apparently, a good deal of strength, the 

 female pushing it into place with her 

 head with a total disregard of its com- 

 fort, all the spiders that are caught be- 

 ing pressed and jammed together into a 

 compact mass. While she is busied in 

 this way she makes a loud cheerful 

 humming noise like that made by the 

 blue and yellow mud-dauhers, as, stand- 

 ing on their heads, they gather tlieir 

 loads of mud. The number of spiders 

 brought Seems to depend upon their 

 size, in which quality they vary greatly, 

 the largest ones being six or eight times 

 as large as the smallest. Rubrociuctuin 

 fills her nest with from seven to twelve, 

 while the larger albopi/osmn brings as 

 man}' as twenty-five or thirty. Those 

 that we e.xamined represented many 

 different genera, and even different 

 families, although they were usually 

 Epeiridae. 



