The Wasps fly only a few yards away, in every direction, one here, another there; they settle on blades of grass, pass their fore-tarsi over their eyes for a moment, as though dazzled by the bright sunshine to which they have suddenly been restored; then they take flight, some sooner, some later, and all, without hesitation, make straight for the south, that is to say, for home. Five hours later I return to the common site of the nests. I am hardly there when I see two of my Cerceres with white dots working at the burrows; soon a third arrives from the fields, with a Weevil between her legs; a fourth is not slow in following. The recognition of four out of twelve in less than fifteen minutes was enough to convince me. I thought it unnecessary to wait any longer. What four could do the others would do, if they had not already done it; and I was quite at liberty to presume that the absent eight were out hunting or else hidden in their underground galleries. Therefore, carried for a mile and a half in a direction and by a road of which they could not have taken cognizance in their paper prisons, the Cerceres, or at least some of them, had returned home. I do not know how far the Cerceres’ hunting-grounds extend; and it is possible that they know the country more or less over a radius of a mile and a half. In that case, they would not have felt sufficiently lost at the spot to which I moved them and they would have got home by their acquired local knowledge. The experiment had to be repeated, at a greater distance and from a starting-point which the Wasp could not be suspected of knowing. I therefore take nine female Cerceres from the same group of burrows that supplied me in the morning. Three of them had just been subjected to the previous test. They were again carried in a dark box, each insect enclosed in its paper bag. The starting-point selected is the nearest town, Carpentras, which lies at about two miles from the burrow. I am to release my insects not among the fields, as on the first occasion, but absolutely in the street, in the centre of a crowded neighbourhood, where the Cerceres, with their rustic habits, had certainly never penetrated. As the day is already far advanced, I postpone the experiments; and my captives spend the night in their prison-cells.