690 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Oct. 29, 1910. 
good gun is certainly entitled to some considera¬ 
tion. 
In addition to your high power rifle, take along 
a small one for birds. I have found a .22 auto¬ 
matic a fine little arm for birds. It is better than 
a shotgun, as you hardly ever get any wing shoot¬ 
ing, and the ammunition is lighter. If you prefer 
a shotgun, take a 20-gauge. 
In a country where trout are as numerous as 
they are in the Kooskia country, some sort of 
fishing equipment is necessary. For a rod my 
personal preference is for a greenheart. I use 
one of six ounces, brazed ferrules, the joints 
wrapped with silver wire. With this rod and an 
adequate reel you will have little difficulty in 
landing even the largest trout—and some of 
them are monsters. In the fly-book I carry a 
full assortment of styles and sizes, from 2 to 6 . 
You will find that in the larger streams your best 
success will come with No. 2. The style matters 
but little. In the upper waters the fish are al¬ 
ways hungry, always ready to nab any fly that is 
tossed to them. If there is a choice it is for 
royal coachman and black gnat. A No. 2 spoon 
hook is a taking bait in many of the lakes. It 
is also valuable in the deep, still pools on the 
rivers, where the great rainbows and char lie. 
Some Solitary Hunting Wasps. 
Most bees, wasps and ants — the great order 
Hymenoptera — lay up food with or near their 
eggs, so that when the eggs hatch, the grubs 
shall be provided with food. 
The commonest example of this is the familiar 
honey bee, whose provision man robs for his 
own advantage. Some insects of this group do 
not lay up a store of food, but the neuters or 
workers take food into their stomach, where it 
is prepared for the young and afterward fed to 
them. Such preparation of food is common to 
many kinds of animals. 
In a large group of these insects the individ¬ 
uals do not themselves care for their young, but 
having laid their eggs prepare a quantity of 
food for the grub and then disappear and leave 
the egg to care for itself. Among those that 
act in this way are the solitary wasps, of which the 
common blue or mud wasp, often known as 
“mud dauber’’ is an example. Anyone who will 
take the trouble to open the nest of one of these 
wasps — and they are usually plentifully dis¬ 
tributed on the inside boarding of hay lofts, 
garrets, boat houses and such places — will find 
that each one has in it a number of spiders. 
Wasps of this group have powerful stings and 
the poison with which they are provided para¬ 
lyzes, but does not kill, their prey. These 
spiders found in the mud wasps’ nests are the 
food stored up there by the mother wasp, against 
the time when the egg she has laid shall hatch, 
and the grub require food. 
All the wasps and hornets are ferocious and 
predatory in habits, and most of them feed to 
a considerable extent on other insects. So true 
is this that in some parts of Europe butchers 
are said to be glad to have them about their 
shops because of the great number of flies which 
they devour, and a certain species in Mauritius, 
which feeds wholly on cockroaches, is on that 
account held in high esteem by the natives. On 
the Pacific coast we have sometimes lain in a 
tent during the day and watched hornets which 
resembled the common white-tail hornet of the 
East, catch flies. They had no difficulty in do¬ 
ing this, at once shaved off the wings with their 
strong jaws and seemed to devour a part of the 
body, dropping a portion. Some of the social 
wasps lay up honey like the bees. In September 
last a bald-faced — whitetail — hornet was seen 
gathering honey from a spike of goldenrod. 
Wasps are divided into two groups, the social 
and the solitary. The common brown wasps, 
the ordinary hornet and the yellowjacket are 
examples of social wasps, x while the mud wasp 
is an example of the solitary group. 
The female blue wasp—there are no workers, 
neuters, in this group—when she has partly com¬ 
pleted her nest of mud deposits in it an egg, and 
THE TARANTULA OR TRAPDOOR SPIDER. 
in the same cell with the egg places several 
small spiders which she has captured and stung, 
and so deprived of the power to escape. The 
cell is now walled up and another is built ad¬ 
joining it in which the operation is repeated, 
and this is continued until the eggs have all 
been deposited, when the nest is completed and 
left. After the egg hatches, the grub feeds on 
the food prepared for it until ready to become 
a pupa, and, at last when it becomes a perfect 
insect, it gnaws its way out through the walls 
of its clay house. 
There are other solitary wasps, just as there 
are not a few bees, which excavate in the soil 
holes or burrows in which they deposit their 
eggs, providing also food for the grub to feed 
on. One of these large hunter wasps, perhaps 
twice the size of a blue wasp, has brown head 
and abdomen and a bright orange thorax. These 
may often be seen in August hard at work ex¬ 
cavating their burrows. They are notable for 
their large, heavy heads and for their bright 
colors. Perhaps this is the species known as 
Sphcx ichnemnonca, or it may belong to the 
genus Ammophila. They dig holes from four 
to six inches deep, beginning by removing the 
surface soil or sand which they drop near the 
spot. After the hole is begun they enter it head 
first, backing out again with a bit of sand. This 
is dropped and then the wasp dives down for 
another piece. As a small pile of sand accumu¬ 
lates where the wasp has dropped the material, 
the insect, after backing out and dropping the 
pellet that it carries, pushes away behind it with 
its hind feet the loose sand on which it stands. 
When the hole has been dug to the required 
depth, the wasp flies off in search of some prey, 
stings a grasshopper or other insect, carries it 
to the nest and in a moment disappears with it 
in the hole. No doubt at the bottom of the hole 
it deposits its egg in the prey, and coming to the 
mouth of the hole again, throws sand into the 
hole on top of the victim. These holes are 
sometimes made in sandy soil or in a gravel 
path. We have seen them made in the bare 
earth of a path worn across a mowing lot. 
Once in mid-summer, while passing such an 
excavation we came upon a large Sphex engaged 
in transporting its prey to its nest. This burden 
consisted of two large black and yellow-winged 
grasshoppers—the ones whose sharp and loud 
cracklings are so frequently heard in mid-sum¬ 
mer. The two grasshoppers were firmly fast¬ 
ened together, and each one was half as long 
again as the wasp. The load she was trans¬ 
porting must have been many times her own 
weight. She had the advantage of smooth go¬ 
ing, for the grasshoppers lay in a well-worn path, 
but she could move them only a few inches at 
a time, and this after much tugging. Then she 
flew off to a little distance to rest. During the 
time that we watched her she moved the grass¬ 
hoppers twelve or fifteen feet along the smooth 
path. 
These hunter wasps are widely distributed and 
of varying sizes and powers. In the Southwest 
is found a large and beautiful species, Pepsis, 
