Field Studies of the Non-Social Wasps 365 
4 was packed with grass;* some of this was dried and 
faded, other strands still green like well-cured hay. At 
4, at the turn of the gallery, was a tightly packed plug 
made of this same material. (For details of this por- 
tion see fig. 43.) The inner portion of the plug, i. e., the 
end facing the nestling, was of material (see arrow in 
fig. 43) which was noticeably finer in its texture than 
the outer strands; in fact, it appeared that the first 
material carried in must have gone through a process 
of malaxation; the outer strands were coarse and loosely 
placed, as is clearly shown in ‘‘X”? in fig. 43. 
After making the cell so clean and tidy, this mother 
nad evidently deposited her egg on an Orthopterous 
insect, but despite her precautions a cuckoo-bee had out- 
witted her. Let us place it to her credit, however, that 
all evidence indicated that the parasite had not entered 
after the work had been completed, but, sneak-thief 
fashion, had entered during the early process of stuffing 
in the grass while the C. auripes was away for material. 
In January, 1919, I found among a lot of sumac stems 
gathered at the southwestern edge of this city, three old 
Stalks (fig. 44) which gave evidence of having once 
harbored the young of this species. The hollow space 
in these had a diameter of about 4% inch. They were all 
closed with the characteristic grass plugs, and in two 
cases (A and B) there were brown cocoons pushed close 
together, 2 in one and 4 in the other, with grass plugs 
beneath and above the cocoons, which served as a floor 
and roof, and separated this portion from the rest of 
the long stem. These cocoons were nearly 34 inch long, 
and the grass plugs at each end of the cell which they 
occupied were each about an inch in length. In another 
stem (C) the unbroken pith at the bottom of the cavity 
*In the figure the grass has been removed from the oriface at 1. 
