178 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol, XI1I. 
I may note here that in my volume on the bees and wasps of India in the 
Fauna of India series only the typical Sphex umbrosus, Christ, is described. i 
’ To-day 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 ona 
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 creatures 
flying, digging, walking around, is most astonishing, When disturbed they 
rose in clouds and flew about one’s legs, but did not attempt to attack, as the 
true wasps (Vespide) or the honey bees (Apis) would have done, 
A noticeable thing was that the openings to the burrows al] faced the 
verandah, the direction of the burrows radiating outwards from the barrack, 
One or two that I dug up showed that they had been tunnelled obliquely 
into the ground for about a foot or so and then, turning at an ang’e upwards, 
ended in a slightly enlarged oval chamber, If one stood still the wasps took 
no notice but continued their work unconcernedly. Some walking about with 
the alert jerky air and quivering of the wings peculiar to fossorial wasps, 
others dug on industriously, paw over paw like any terrier, while others con- 
tinued bringing in their captures of green grasshoppers stung into a state 
of unconsciousness. These they stuffed, and pulled and pushed into their 
burrows always head downwards, The grasshoppers I found belonged to the 
family Locustide, and all that I saw were in the immature stage, unable to fly. 
Of other species of Sphez, I have found and dug up at various times the 
nests of Sphex aurulentus, Fabr,,var. ferrugineus, Lepel.,and Sphex nigripes, 
Smith, The latter I found provisioning its nest like S. wmbrosus, with immature 
Locustide ; while in the nests of Sphex aurulentus 1 found only the immature 
forms of some large species of Acridid@. Itis probable that the species of 
Sphex keep to Orthoptera as their prey ; each species confining itself to some 
one species of locust or grasshopper, for the captures { found in the nests of 
S. nigripes belonged to a different and larger species of the Locustidg from 
the species I found Sphex umbrosus bringing in a3 noted above. 
The majority of the species of the Pompilide, members of the genera Pom= 
pilus, Psendagenia, Paragenia, Salius, etc., provision their nests with spiders, 
again each species of wasp selecting and keeping to one species of spider, A 
few, ¢.g., Pompilus bracatus, and Salius verticalis, I have found hunting and 
carrying off cockroaches, but spiders are par excellence their prey. I once 
saw aud timed a fight between the huge fossorial wasp Sualius sycophanta, 
Gyebodo, and a very large species of spider (Galeodes) which is common in 
