Feb., 1892. 
NATURAL HISTORY JOTTINGS IN NATAL. 
89 
cursory, it may be that I have misjudged them. The nests of 
these wasps are wonderfully made. They consist of a group 
of hexagonal cells, made of a vegetable fibre, suspended by a 
foot-stalk of the same material from the branch of a bush or 
tree. I think these nests are the work of a single wasp, or 
pair of wasps, and if it is so, I can only account for there 
being so many—about a dozen—sitting on one nest, by sup¬ 
posing that they have just emerged from their pupa state, 
and are drying their wings before flying off to commence life 
for themselves. 
Some wasps make their cells of mud, and place them, 
sometimes singly, sometimes in groups of three and four, in 
most out-of-the-way places. I have found them stuck between 
the heads of two rivets on a locomotive boiler that had been 
left for some time unused. These cells are not hexagonal, 
but generally cylindrical with rounded ends, something like a 
diminutive sausage. In the bottom of each cell is placed a 
goodly stock of spiders for the nourishment of the larva 
on its coming out from the egg ; and these spiders are quite 
fresh, and are, I believe, not really dead. 
I have seen one of the mason wasps dragging a spider 
along which was almost as large as itself. In Figuier’s 
“ Insect World” it is stated that insects, when on the wing, 
can only support about their own weight; but I think this can 
hardly be correct, or else there are many exceptions. Our 
wasps manage to get insects heavier than themselves carried 
into places, where they can only get by flying. I once put a 
humble bee, that I had stunned, on the board in front of a 
beehive, and in a few minutes I was greatly surprised to see 
a bee get astride of it, and fly with it right out of sight, thus 
exhibiting a strength of wing capable of supporting quite 
twice its weight. I then placed another there, but the bees 
chased me and left the humble bee, so I did not continue the 
experiment. There is one wasp that makes a long string of 
cells on a dead twig or grass stem, and these cells are made 
of cow manure, and are about six or seven in number. Each 
cell contains a few spiders and an egg laid by the wasp, which 
has a yellow, black-tipped body, and a waist that looks too 
weak to bear it. 
I one day watched a sand wasp burrowing in the sand, 
and was astonished at the rapidity with which it tunnelled 
out the ground. Commencing to scratch with its fore feet, 
it dug a hole in the slanting face of the bank, getting rid 
of the stuff it dug out by plunging it out like a rabbit in 
its burrow. Very soon the sand began to accumulate behind 
it to such an extent as to nearly block the hole ; when, with 
a backward movement, it shovelled it further away from 
