More Hunting Wasps 



Tachytes will come here no more. Other 

 burrows will occupy her, distributed at the 

 whim of her vagabond humour. 



A cell provisioned before my eyes on the 

 22nd of August, in one of the walls in the 

 harmas,^ contained the finished cocoon a 

 week later. I have not noted many exam- 

 ples of so rapid a development. This co- 

 coon recalls, in its shape and texture, that of 

 the Bembex-wasps. It is hard and miner- 

 alized, this is to say, the warp and woof of 

 silk are hidden by a thick encrustation of 

 sand. This composite structure seems to 

 me characteristic of the family; at all events 

 I find it in the three species whose cocoons 

 I know. If the Tachytes are nearly related 

 to the Spheges in diet, they are far removed 

 from them in the industry of their larvae. 

 The first are workers in mosaic, encrusting 

 a network of silk and sand; the second weave 

 pure silk. 



Of smaller size and clad in black with 

 trimmings of silvery down on the edge of 

 the abdominal segments, the Tarsal Tachy- 

 tes {T. tarsina, LEP.) ^ frequents the 



^ The harmas was the piece of enclosed waste land in 

 which the author used to study his insects in their nat- 

 ural state. Cf. The Life of the Fly, by J. Henri Fabre, 

 translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chap. i. — 

 Translator's Note. 



* According to M. J, Perez, to whom I submitted the 

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