126 
quite sociable among themselves; several females would nest 
close together at the bases of small plants or bushes in a gar- 
den plot on the college grounds. The considerable heap of 
soil brought up in excavating the burrow would readily locate 
it; else the loud though harmless buzzing of the proprietress 
would serve this purpose. 
The tunnel at first slopes but little, then it goes down steeply 
from 10 inches to over a foot, piercing a tough stratum of clay. 
It is one-celled and provisioned with various locustids, grass- 
hoppers, young or mature; cone-headed grasshoppers and Duce- 
tia adspersa Brunner being among the commonest. The latter 
insect, by the way, is quite a nuisance, for it devours the orna- 
mental flowers of the various Canna which are commonly grown 
as border plants, and Chlorion does a good work in reducing this 
pest. The paralyzed prey may be larger than its captor, but 
never so “heavy that it cannot be 
carried on the wing. Several are 
stored in a single cell and _ the 
Chlorion egg placed between the 
first and second pair of legs. The 
Fig. 62. Cocoon of C. umbrosus egs 1s 9x1 mm., and slightly 
var. Natural size. bowed. I fed a couple of the lar- 
vae to full growth, when they 
measured about 37 mm. long. About four and a half days were 
required for this feeding stage, when one of the young wasps 
consumed four rather large “grasshoppers and two small ones 
which I captured and incapacitated. 

The silken cocoon (Fig. 62) is about 35-36 x 8.5-9 mm., and 
therefore more slender than that of either C. aurulentus or A. 
mutica; it 1s also considerably thinner and of a brownish yellow 
texture. The insect passes the dry and cool months in this 
stage, remaining in the cocoon as a resting larva. 
Bingham (1900-1) speaks of a variety of Sphex umbrosus 
nesting in a large colony at Mandalay. He says in part: 
‘“Today I went down in the morning to see the swarm by daylight, 
and a marvellous sight it is. 
‘““The site of the barrack, round which the Sphex was swarming, was on 
a slope. To get a level space for the building the ground had been cut 
away to the west, leaving a perpendicular bank, extending along three 
sides of the end of the barrack at a distance from the edge of the lower 
verandah of from twelve to fifteen feet. This space for a length, as I 
have said, of forty or fifty yards, as also the perpendicular face of the 
bank itself, was one mass of the wasps’ burrows. There must be some 
thousands of the insects about, and the loud buzzing, with the incessant 
motion of the brilliant little creature flying, digging, walking around, is 
most astonishing. When disturbed they rose in clouds and flew about 
