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MUSCA DOMESTICA LINN. VERSUS VESPA OCCIDENTALIS 
CRESSON. 
> 
> 
BY FRANCIS HUNTINGTON 
During the collecting expeditions of 
his summer vacations the writer has had 
frequent occasions to note the mislead- 
ing nature of the vernacular name of the 
It at first a 
matter of surprise to find that wherever 
our camp was made— whether on the 
broad plains of western Kansas, many 
miles from the abode. 
or in some secluded canon of the Rocky 
mountains but rarely visited by hunters 
and.tourists —the locality was already 
occupied in full force by this insect so 
commonly supposed to be exclusively 
found in and around the permanent 
dwellings of the human race. In such 
uninhabited localities the tents would be 
pitched but a few hours before they 
would become disagreeably filled with 
flies, all of which, with the exception of 
common liouse-fly. was 
nearest human 
Ee Lhe 
an occasional Stomoxys, were unmistak- 
ably Musca domestica Linn. 
While camping in Sauta Fé cation, N. 
Mexico, in August, 1880, this plague of 
flies seemed about to be unusually for- 
midable. On the very first night the 
lower surfaces of the roofs and ridge- 
poles of the tents were fairly blackened 
by the immense multitudes of dipterous 
pests. The next morning it was ob- 
served, somewhat to the alarm of the 
women and children of the party, that 
large numbers of so-called yellow-jackets 
SNOW, LAWRENCE, KANSAS. 
(Vespa occidentalis Cr.) were entering 
the tents. 
posed that the object of the new comers 
was to forage for sugar and other camp 
supplies. But before night it was 
noticed that the numbers of flies in the 
tents had been perceptibly reduced, and 
on the second morning it was discovered 
that the wasps were intent on the ac- 
ceptable task of removing our trouble- 
For some time it was sup- 
some guests. There were generally as 
many as forty or fifty wasps in each 
tent at once, and each wasp was ob- 
served on leaving the tent to be carrying 
out the body of a fly, not for burial nor 
as food for its captors, but for storage 
in the nests of the wasps and undoubt- 
edly as food for their young. Each 
captured fly, before removal from the 
tents, was deprived of its wings and 
legs, and on several mornings we were 
awakened from our slumbers by these 
severed dropping upon our 
faces. The wasps were unremitting in 
their labors from daylight to dusk, and 
in four or five days the flies had ceased 
to be troublesome by their numbers, the 
wasps having gained upon them so as to 
dispose of them almost as rapidly as 
they entered the tents. Occasionally a 
specimen of Vespa maculata Linn. was 
observed cooperating with V. occidentalis 
Cr. in the removal of the flies. 
members 
