The galleries are ready in a few days, especially as those of the previous year are employed with the aid of a few repairs. The other Cerceres, so far as I know, have no fixed home, no family inheritance handed down from generation to generation. A regular gipsy tribe, they settle singly wherever the chances of their vagrant life may lead them, provided that the soil suits them. But the Great Cerceris is faithful to her household gods. The overhanging blade of sandstone that sheltered her predecessors is adopted by her in her turn; she digs in the same layer of sand wherein her forbears dug; and, adding her own labours to those which went before, she obtains deep retreats that are not always easy of inspection. The diameter of the galleries is wide enough to admit a man’s thumb; and the insect moves about in them readily, even when laden with the prey which we shall see it capture. Their direction, at first horizontal to a depth of four to eight inches, describes a sudden bend and dips more or less obliquely now to this side, now to that. With the exception of the horizontal part and the bend, the direction of the rest of the tube seems to be regulated by the difficulties presented by the ground, as is proved by the twists and turns observed in the more distant portion. The total length of the shaft attains as much as eighteen inches. At the far end of the tube are the cells, few in number and each provisioned with five or six corpses of the Beetle order. But let us leave these building details and come to facts more capable of exciting our admiration. The victim which the Cerceris chooses whereon to feed her grubs is a large-sized Weevil, Cleonus ophthalmicus. We see the kidnapper arrive heavily laden, carrying her victim between her legs, body to body, head to head, and plump down at some distance from her hole, to complete the rest of the journey without the aid of her wings. The Wasp is now dragging her prey in her mandibles up a vertical, or at least a very steep surface, productive of frequent tumbles which send kidnapper and kidnapped rolling helter-skelter to the bottom, but incapable of discouraging the indefatigable mother, who, covered with dirt and dust, ends by diving into the burrow with her booty, which she has not let go for a single moment. Whereas the Cerceris finds it far from easy to walk with such a burden, especially on ground of this character, it is a different matter when she is flying, which she does with a vigour that astonishes us when we consider that the sturdy little creature is carrying a prize almost as large as herself and heavier. I had the curiosity to compare the weight of the Cerceris and her victim: the first turned the scale at 150 milligrammes; [6] the second averaged 250 milligrammes, [7] or nearly double.