238 WASP STUDIES AFIELD 



from the resting body. Occasionally it proved difficult to 

 arouse the playmate, and sometimes it was necessary to ad- 

 minister a few hard blows with the abdomen on the abdomen 

 of the loiterer to make it wake up. This is not mating. This 

 performance of dancing in the air less than five feet from 

 the ground, chasing one another on the wing, resting flat 

 upon the ground near together, has happene.d so often in 

 our observations in various times and places that we feel 

 confident that this play is a constant and characteristic habit 

 of A. procera, and not the antics of an individual or group. 

 We are also sure that it is play and not courtship, for 

 among the one hundred or more seen that day, only two 

 were females. 



At Fox Creek, on August 2, we saw different -aspects of 

 the mating of A. procera on the sandbar. Here there were 

 about a hundred males and only three females. The males 

 were chasing one another and flying about near the ground 

 so wildly and playfully that we could not tell what they were 

 until we took them in the net. But the females' behavior 

 was different. They would walk about slowly in a small 

 space as if under the pretext of looking for something. 

 Sometimes, during a brief period of this, a number of males 

 would, at different times, swoop down for an instant- 

 aneous mating, then fly away again and join the others in 

 the dance, seldom or never returning to her. This behavior 

 is somewhat different from the one case observed a few 

 years ago at Lake View, Kansas. Three procera, two males 

 and a female, clinging together in a mass, were flying 

 slowly from plant to plant. 



At Moselle, Mo., many large A. procera were flying about 

 in courtship, not on the hot sand but usually in the low, wet 

 places near a stream. They never rested long enough for 

 us to ascertain the species without capturing them. One 

 would follow another in a straight line for a long distance; 



