The Hunting IVasps 



' My ambition was far from satisfied. It was 

 not enough for me to identify the kidnapper 

 and her victim : I wanted the larva, the sole 

 consumer of those rich provisions. After ex- 

 hausting this first vein of Buprestes, I hastened 

 to make fresh excavations and, planting my 

 spade more carefully still, I at last succeeded in 

 discovering two larvae which crowned the good 

 fortune of this campaign. In less than an hour 

 I ransacked the haunts of three Cerceres ; and 

 my booty was some fifteen whole Buprestes, 

 with fragments of a still larger number. I 

 calculated, keeping, I believe, well within the 

 mark, that this particular garden contained 

 five-and-twenty nests, making an enormous 

 total of buried Buprestes. What must it be, 

 I thought, in places where in a few hours I have 

 caught on the garlic-flowers as many as sixty 

 Cerceres, whose nests were apparently in the 

 neighbourhood and no doubt victualled just as 

 abundantly ? And so my imagination, never 

 going beyond the bounds of probability, showed 

 me underground, within a small radius, Buprestis 

 fasciata by the thousand, whereas, during the 

 thirty years and upwards that I have been 

 studying the entomology of this district, I never 

 discovered a single one in the open. 



* Once only, perhaps twenty years ago, I 

 found the abdomen of this insect, together 



