130 WASP STUDIES AFIELD 



been there for any considerable length of time, they had 

 kept very close to their own particular habitat where we 

 found them, for all other parts of the field had been thor- 

 oughly scanned repeatedly. Further observations will be 

 necessary to show whether they disseminate over the field 

 or keep strictly to a limited area of peculiar characteristics. 



A strip of ground by the roadside, perhaps five feet wide, 

 some twenty feet from the barn, was thickly overgrown 

 with pigweed, smartweed and bulrushes. This ground 

 sloped down into a depression which, at that time, was a 

 stagnant mudhole. At the end of this strip was an old 

 manure-pile covering a large area, partly overgrown with 

 vegetation. Just above these plants and along the roadside 

 a number of these wasps were flying. They were doing 

 nothing in particular that we could see but flying idly to and 

 fro along this strip of ground. Their flight followed a 

 zig-zag course, in and out; they seldom rested, and, if one 

 tried to follow them with the eye, they seemed to disappear 

 among the vegetation, but one could not trace them. The 

 wasps are very conspicuous in flight ; their reddish abdomens 

 with the two blotches of yellow on one of the segments make 

 a brilliant showing. There were probably thirty or more of 

 them in flight. We watched them for over an hour and 

 saw only two of them sipping the nectar of the flowers of 

 smartweed and pigweed, and one the snakeroot, but to 

 them the sunflowers near by did not seem at all attractive. 

 This strange flight could not have been a search for food, 

 and we hardly think it could have been a preliminary of mat- 

 ing, since they did not seem to chase one another, although 

 both sexes were present. 



Again and again, on other days, we watched them in this 

 vague, monotonous flight over the weeds; we watched in 

 various kinds of weather and at different hours of the day. 

 Sometimes there were more, sometimes fewer of them, but 



