THE LIFE OF A SOLITARY WASP 
F all “the Tribes of my Frontier” none are 
more deserving of notice than the solitary 
wasp. Their ways are of even greater 
interest than those of the social hymenop- 
tera, whose praises have been so admirably sung by 
Maeterlinck, Grant Allen, and others. Perhaps it is the 
lonely life led by the solitary wasps that gives them 
so much character ; for character they certainly have. 
“So whimsical,” writes Burroughs, “so fickle, so for- 
getful, so fussy, so wise, and yet so foolish, as these 
little people are; such victims of routine and yet so 
individual, such apparent foresight and yet such thought- 
lessness, at such great pains to dig a hole and builda 
cell, and then at times sealing it up without storing it 
with food or laying the egg, half finishing hole after 
hole, and then abandoning them without any apparent 
reason ; sometimes killing their spiders, at other times 
‘ only paralysing them; one species digging its burrow 
before it captures its game, another catching its prey 
and then digging the hole; some of them hanging the 
spider up in the fork of a weed to keep it away from 
the ants while they work at the nest, and running to it 
every few minutes to see that it is safe; others laying 
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