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cessful prepared to fly away, when I captured it ; these Spliecodes 
were large and fairly corresponded in size to the Andrena, but 
there were no small ones about, and as far as my recollection goes, 
I have not found large Sphecodes without finding large Halicti or 
Andrence in its vicinity, and small Sphecodes without small 
Halicti ; of course this may be only a coincidence, although I 
think it is more than that. Mr. Smith tells me he has seen them 
burrowing ; this certainly goes far to prove that they are construc- 
tive bees, but still my opinion is, that they are not so. 
In the early Spring, I was struck with the enormous quantity of 
female wasps that were met with in every direction. This was not 
confined to this district; as many correspondents to the Gardeners’ 
periodicals noticed the same thing; one of them, who signs himself 
“ P. Grieve, Bury St. Edmunds,” writing to the Gardeners’ Chronicle 
of June 19th, says “it has been his duty for the last 28 years to 
count the slain wasps and hornets, for which one penny each is 
given, up to the end of the month of May ; this season the numbers 
reached the enormous quantity of 2,566, and the sum paid for 
them was £10 13s. lOd. ; about 5 or 6 per cent, of them were 
hornets, the numbers captured during former seasons has varied from 
500 to 600 up to the unprecedented number of the present season.” 
Several others have given statistics of numbers killed or paid for, 
all proving that the number of these insects has been enormous. 
The nests, however, in this neighbourhood, as far as my observation 
has gone, were not so plentiful as I expected they would have been, 
many of the females must have been killed by the cold wet weather 
. which occurred during the Spring and Summer. 
The leaf cutter bees which make a thimble of pieces of leaves for 
their nest, and then close the entrance with circular pieces after 
having put in a sufficient mixture of honey and pollen, are said by 
Shuckard to fix the circular pieces in and hold them in their places 
by slightly springing them, but in a cell I examined of Megachile 
maritima the pieces were certainly cemented in their places round 
the edge with a substance which looked like wax laid on very 
thinly, but still clearly perceptible. 
At Brundall at the end of July, I had the good fortune to take 
