CHAPTER IX 

 THE HUNTERS OF SMALL ORTHOPTERA 



Alyson melleus Say. [S. A. Rohwer], 



The experience of the summer's field work in different 

 places has taught us to find these delicate creatures only in 

 the peculiar environment that seems best adapted to their 

 needs. We have never found them elsewhere than in a cool, 

 damp bank of mud or sandy clay, near to a body of water. 

 They jnay be very near to the dry earth or the hot, sandy 

 areas, but they scrupulously avoid such regions. 



The first ones that we found were at Moselle, Missouri, 

 on June 30, 1916. They were seen carrying green insects 

 under their abdomens and entering holes in the mud bank. 

 Their burrows were invisible to us because of a number of 

 little wet pellets of mud that lay over the mouth of each 

 hole, but the owners found their way in somehow. After 

 the wasps were captured, the holes were exposed by brushing 

 away the pellets covering them. Sometimes the little lumps, 

 or rather shapeless mouthfuls of mud, were strewn or 

 heaped, without any arrangement, over and around the 

 mouth of the burrow; in other cases they were piled dex- 

 trously about the hole to form a crude little chimney or 

 canopy over the orifice on the sloping bank. 



Their little burrows were about one-eighth inch in diam- 

 eter and went straight into the bank, at right angles to its 

 sloping surface, then curved slightly downward. They varied 



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