ii8 DAN BEARD'S ANIMAL BOOK 



tim is stupefied by some process so that it can 

 neither walk, hop, nor fly, but passively allows it- 

 self to be buried, 



PUT IN COLD STORAGE 



so to speak and kept for the young wasp to feed 

 upon when the egg is hatched. In order that I 

 might more readily observe how the black digger 

 proceeded to bury its victim, I sat down in the 

 dusty road with my legs spread each side of a wasp 

 hole. 



When the digger arrived with a grass-hopper 

 it seemed very much annoyed by my presence and 

 walked 'round and 'round, making a threatening 

 buzzing noise, but when it discovered that I did 

 not molest it, it went back to where it had left 

 the grass-hopper and grasping the stupefied insect 

 by the head with its four hind legs, the wasp used 

 its two front legs for running. 



In this manner the grass-hopper was dragged 

 to the edge of the hole. After reaching this point 

 the wasp entered the hole tail foremost and tak- 

 ing hold of the grass-hopper, this time with its 

 front legs, with some difficulty and not without 

 considerable work, enlarging the hole at points 

 where its narrowness interfered with the grass- 

 hopper's progress, it dragged the latter slowly 

 out of sight; the chamber at the bottom of the 

 hole must have been larger than the passage, be- 

 cause after a time the wasp came out again and in 

 doing so it must necessarily have had room to pass 

 around the body of the grass-hopper. 



