Let us pass over numerous expeditions, fruitless researches, and the tedium of long waiting, and present the Sphex to the reader just as she shows herself to the observer. Here she is, at the bottom of a hollow way with high sandy banks. She comes on foot, but aids herself with her wings in dragging along her heavy captive. The ephippiger’s antennæ, like long fine threads, are the harness ropes. With her mandibles and holding her head high, she grasps one of them, passing it between her feet, and the prey is dragged on its back. If some unevenness of ground should oppose itself to this style of haulage, she stops, clasps the ample provender, and transports it by very short flights, going on foot between whiles whenever this is possible. One never sees her undertake sustained flights for long distances carrying prey, as do those strong cruisers, the Bembex and Cerceris, which will carry perhaps for a good half mile through the air, the former their Diptera, the latter their weevils—very light prey compared with the huge ephippiger. The overwhelming size of its captive forces S. occitanica to convey it along the ground—a means of transit both slow and difficult. The same reason—namely, the great size and weight of the prey—entirely upsets the usual order followed by the Hymenoptera, in their labours,—an order well known, and consisting in first hollowing a burrow and then victualling it. The prey not being disproportioned to the size of the spoiler, facility of transport by flight allows the Hymenopteron a choice as to the position of her domicile. What matter if she has to hunt at considerable distances? Having made a capture, she returns home with rapid flight; it is indifferent to her whether she is near or far. Therefore she prefers the spot where she was born, and where her predecessors have lived; there she inherits deep galleries, the accumulated labour of former generations; with a little repair they can be used as avenues to new chambers, better defended than would be a single excavation a little below the surface made annually. Such is the case with Cerceris tuberculata and Philanthus apivorus, and even if the inherited dwelling should not be solid enough to resist wind and weather from one year’s end to another, and to be handed down to the next generation, at all events the Hymenopteron finds conditions of greater safety in spots consecrated by ancestral experience. There she hollows out galleries, each serving as corridors to a group of cells, thus economising the labour to be expended on the entire egg-laying.