

HUNTERS OF SMALL ORTHOPTERA 157 



which we opened. The mother was at the bottom of the 

 burrow. 



Williams 9 gives some interesting data on the biology of 

 this species. He records that one soon rendered helpless a 

 small Grylhis by a sting under the thorax, malaxated it on 

 the ventral side of the neck, and carried it toward her nest, 

 ventral side down. The wasp made little runs and short, 

 flying jumps with her burden, and after she entered her 

 hole, remained there for five minutes. In filling up her 

 tunnel, she gathered little lumps of earth and other material 

 such as twigs, thorns and grasshopper excrement and 

 dropped them in. None of the material, he says, was tamped 

 down. She did not use her feet in filling up the hole; the 

 feet of Notogonidea are not armed with brushes to assist in 

 such work, and the heavy black earth in which she was 

 working did not readily permit digging with the feet. 



In the first argentata that we observed, we found precisely 

 this behavior, carrying and dropping into the hole pellets, 

 fragments of stones and leaves. Upon opening the burrow, 

 however, we did find the gallery just above the chamber 

 well packed with earth, which she surely must have com- 

 pressed, not in the usual way in which wasps pack down the 

 soil but, as our second wasp showed, with the ventral part 

 of the abdomen moving in a slow, grinding, circular motion. 

 While we did not witness all the filling of the hole of the 

 second wasp, we did see this one scraping in loose dirt with 

 the front legs. A third one, to, as we have shown, used 

 her legs to scrape in the soil. 



Since we have recorded individuals of this species very 

 early in the season, one would expect that their vegetative 

 and reproductive functions would soon be over and they 

 would die off. But this is not so, for we have one record of 



9 Kans. Uni. Sci. Bull. 8: 191. 1913. 



