47 
inches. It is built of shreds of woody material, bark, fibers, 01 even 
of cotton lint, sometimes with pellets of earth intermingled, but 
usually thin and with something of the papery texture and appear- 
ance of a wasp’s nest. ‘The object of this curious structure has not 
been determined with certainty. In some situations it serves the 
purpose of keeping the loose earth from falling into the burrow and 
may afford protection against enemies of some kind as yet unknown. 
After the tube has been built the insects seem reluctant to crawl over 
it to the ground outside. They even carry the pellets of earth 
brought out of the burrow up the stem of the plant and far out 
on the branches, and then drop them off. 
STINGING HABITS OF THE KELEP. 
The most obviously wasp-like habit of the kelep is, of course, the 
adroit stinging of its prey to produce paralysis and consequent help- 
lessness. It has long been known that the mud daubers and the 
digger wasps stock their brood cells in advance with paralyzed insects 
or spiders, though very few of them are known to attack beetles. 
The insects are permanently paralyzed, but not killed outright, and 
afford the young wasps an adequate supply of fresh food on which 
to grow to maturity before emerging from the cell in which the egg 
was deposited by the mother insect. It has been claimed by some 
observers that paralysis results because the insects captured by the 
wasps are always stung in a nerve ganglion. This extreme refine- 
ment of instinct is doubted by some, but seems to have been estab- 
lished by careful observers. 
In dealing with the boll weevil there can be no doubt that the 
kelep shows great instinctive skill, and often persistence as well, for 
the armor of the weevil permits the insertion of the sting at only two 
points—on the middle line of the ventral surface, at the two joints 
of the body, one between head and thorax, the other between the two 
parts of the thorax. The difference in the use of the sting bets, een 
the keleps and the true ants is most effectively shown when repre- 
sentatives of the two groups are brought together and permitted to 
fight. The ant tries to bite its antagonist, the kelep to sting and 
paralyze, the latter strategy being much more effective. 
This habit of stinging other insects allies the kelep not only with 
the predaceous wasps, but also with the Mutillide and other para- 
sitic groups, which, instead of preying on other insects or storing 
them up for their young, lay their eggs in the living insect direct or 
in the nests of the social Hymenoptera. The stings of the worker 
bees and ants are, as is well known, merely modified ovipositors. 
The males do not have stings, and the tendency to use them is gen- 
erally less in the queens, in which the egg-laying function remains 
predominant. 
