142 THE SOLITARY WASPS. 



Bracing herself firmly on her legs she used the end of her abdo- 

 men as an instrument and with it she now pounded the earth, 

 now rubbed it, like a pestle in a mortar, and now used it as a 

 brush to sweep away loose dust. Sometimes she would throw 

 a little earth back under her body with her mandibles and rub 

 it down with her abdomen. This part of the work being fin- 

 ished she spent a few minutes in sweeping the ground with her 

 first legs, and then brought a quantity of small objects and 

 placed them over the nest, a little stick, the petal of a faded 

 flower, a scrap of dead leaf, and so on, until ten or twelve things 

 had been collected. This artistic finishing up of her duties re- 

 called AmmophUa, but among our subsequent examples of 

 fuscipcnnis we never saw one do her work with such nicety. 

 They were usually contented to fill in the nest more or less 

 compactly, sometimes doing much of the work from the outside,, 

 to brush off the surface without any rubbing or pounding, and 

 then to bring two or three little pebbles or lumps of earth to 

 place over the spot. 



So far as we were concerned this was one of the most fearless 

 of the wasps, not even interrupting her work when we once 

 placed a glass over her as she was filling her nest, but the ap- 

 proach of an ant would throw her into a perfect panic and 

 seizing her spider she would make off with every sign of terror. 

 It is diificut to understand why wasps of this species, as well 

 as of Mguttatus, never offer combat to the ants that rob them 

 right and left, but invariably seek safety in retreat. 



P. fuscipennis rarely circles about when leaving a place, and 

 this is unfortunate since her sense of locality semes to be partic- 

 ularly weak. She nearly always has to hunt for the plant upon 

 which she has placed her spider, and always loses track of her 

 nest when she tries to bring the spider to it. (PI. XII., fig. 5.) 

 "We once caught her as she was carrying her spider, and then re- 

 leased her on the same spot, but she became so much confused 

 that without our assistance she would never have found it again. 



P. fuscipennis fastens, her egg to the abdomen of the spider. 

 An egg that was taken from the nest just after it was laid 



