88 BULLETIN OF WISCONSIN NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. VOL. 1, NO. 2. 
and, going backward, dragged out a large spider, which was held 
by the under and hind part of the cephalothorax. She took her 
victim into the nest, and remained within for half an hour. When 
she came out w^e captured her, but, although we dug up the place, 
we failed to find the spider. 
Sphex ichneumonea Linn. 
This great Sphex is so striking in appearance that we never 
see her without a pleasurable excitement, and this feeling is in- 
tensified when we find her actually engaged upon the serious busi- 
ness of life. In the summer of 1896 we had seen her dig out her 
nest, but three years had passed without a similar experience, 
when, on a sunny August morning, we found a large, suggestive 
looking hole which bore the marks of recent labor, a pile of fresh 
earth being heaped to one side of it. A whirr of wings and a 
flash of yellow soon announced the arrival of the big Sphex, who 
at once resumed her task with a great show of energy, and kept 
at it persistently for an hour and a half. It was half past eleven 
o'clock when she departed in search of her prey, and she did not 
return with it until fifteen minutes before one, when she appeared 
on foot carrying her big meadow grasshopper over the bushes and 
weeds. The burden was laid down at the doorway while the w^asp 
ran into the nest, out again, then off to a little distance and back, 
finally seizing it by an antenna and dragging it within. All this 
we had seen before, but at this point, in oiir former observation, 
we had interrupted the natural course of events by opening the 
tunnel and carrying ofif the grasshopper with the egg of the wasp 
upon it. We now proposed to see the final closure of the nest, 
but 'to our surprise the wasp took in only a little earth — enough to 
fill the opening of a single cell — and leaving the main entrance 
wide open, departed with a comfortable air of "duty performed." 
We had supposed that each nest of Sphex served as the repository 
of a single egg, but this conduct suggested that several cells might 
be made, on successive days, leading from the main passage-way, 
each cell being stored with a gra'sshopper, and this proved to be 
true. On the following day, August tenth, we found our wasp 
at work upon a second cell, but did not wait to see it filled. On 
August eleventh the rain fell heavily excepting for an hour or two 
in the middle of the day, and we did not visit the nest. On the 
morning of the twelfth we found her working, presumably at a 
third cell. She stored a grasshopper at a little before twelve 
o'clock, and then filled the tunnel up solidly, evidently having 
concluded operations in this locality. 
We did not open this nest until the eighteenth of August, 
when we found only two of the cells, one of these containing a 
