i8 
Psyche 
[March 
the prey made a fairly prolonged closure which I took to 
be a final closure but which proved not to be (see Aug. I ). 
During this she drove away two chrysidids (see below, 
under “parasites”). 
1400, 1409, 1414, 1445: Each time she reappeared in the nesting 
arena, walked about for a few seconds to a minute, then 
flew off. 
Started digging at G. 
Stopped digging, leaving hole open, and is now walking 
about the nesting arena. 
Digging at G 1 . 
Closed burrow with a single pebble, scraped a small 
amount of sand over top, and flew off. 
Landed at nest, then flew to a Solidago in blossom two 
meters away, remained for a few minutes, then was not 
seen again today. 
August 1. 1020: Landed at G 1 , remained two minutes and flew off. 
This is a cool, partly cloudy morning. 
1040: Now cloudy and windy (began to rain at 1100). I dug 
out the nesting arena, eventually finding 12 nests and one 
incompleted burrow (G) (see Fig. 6). Eight of these 
had cocoons, one was an empty nest (G 1 ), one had a 
single caterpillar with an egg (F), and two had wasp 
larvae (D and E, closed yesterday, E apparently tempo- 
rarily, since the wasp larva was small and there were only 
3 sawfly larvae in the cell). 
Apparently nest F had been initiated on July 30 and was not 
visited on July 31 (the wasp presumably remembering that it con- 
tained an egg and did not require additional prey). Thus we can say 
that this wasp very definitely maintained two nests simultaneously (D 
and E ) , very probably three ( if we include F ) , and that she was 
associated with three nests in the course of one day (D, E, G 1 ) while 
presumably retaining a fourth in her memory. Clearly this calls for a 
much more detailed study, but it would appear that the models 
provided by Baerends (1941) for A. pubescens apply very well to 
this species. 
Some unexplained features of behavior. — On two different oc- 
casions I dug out a series of nests in a single nesting arena and found 
that all or most of the nests contained eggs. In one case there were six 
nests, five of them containing a single prey with an egg, the remaining 
one being empty. In another case there were four nests, all of them 
containing only one prey; in three cases the prey bore an egg, in the 
1450: 
1457 : 
1502 : 
1600: 
1632: 
