The Return to the Nest 307 



the burrows ; soon a third arrives from the 

 fields, with a Weevil between her legs ; a fourth 

 is not slow in following. The recognition of 

 four out of twelve in less than fifteen minutes 

 was enough to convince me. I thought it un- 

 necessary to wait any longer. What four could 

 do the others would do, if they had not already 

 done it ; and I was quite at liberty to presume 

 that the absent eight were out hunting or else 

 hidden in their underground galleries. There- 

 fore, carried for a mile and a half in a direction 

 and by a road of which they could not have 

 taken cognizance in their paper prisons, the 

 Cerceres, or at least some of them, had returned 

 home. 



I do not know how far the Cerceres' hunting- 

 grounds extend ; and it is possible that they 

 know the country more or less over a radius of 

 a mile and a half. In that case, they would 

 not have felt sufficiently lost at the spot to 

 which I moved them and they would have got 

 home by their acquired local knowledge. The 

 experiment had to be repeated, at a greater 

 distance and from a starting-point which the 

 Wasp could not be suspected of knowing. 



I therefore take nine female Cerceres from 

 the same group of burrows that supplied me in 

 the morning. Three of them had just been sub- 

 jected to the previous test. They were again 



