1965] 
Evans — A mmophila azteca 
19 
Fig. 6. Arrangement of successive nests of no. 2030. Nests A-G 1 were 
prepared in that order (see text) ; unlettered nests were not seen to be dug 
or provisioned and were presumably completed before the beginning of 
intensive observations (at least in part). Fig. 7. Arrangement of nests of 
no. 2031, which nested about 2 meters from the preceding at Jackson Hole. 
fourth case a small larva. Unfortunately in both instances the wasp 
associated with the nesting arena was unmarked, and I did not observe 
the site for a long enough time to be certain that only one female was 
responsible for each set of nests. As mentioned earlier, I did find one 
case in which an unmarked female shared a nesting arena with a 
marked female. If the above two cases did involve a single female 
each, then that female must have prepared several nests on the same 
day, or over no more than two or three days, and laid several eggs in 
rather rapid succession. When the larvae in these nests approached 
maturity, the female would have to obtain many prey in order to 
provision all of these nests. Whether truly synchronous nesting (as 
opposed to the overlapping of successive nests) occurs in this species 
remains to be determined. 
On one occasion (2007D) I dug out a nesting arena and found 
three nests, one of which contained one caterpillar, the other two two 
sawflies each : but none of the nests contained an egg. This suggests 
that these might have been storage burrows, the prey to be exhumed 
later and used for oviposition or for feeding a larva. If in fact this 
species does at times maintain several nests synchronously, then the 
maintenance of storage nests would seem of great adaptive value, 
since it would spread out the requisite hunting over a greater number 
of days. It is possible that the maintenance of storage burrows is not 
a rare phenomenon in A?nmophila. Hartman (1905) found two 
