‘Our Burrowing Wasp digs her gallery with her mandibles and her front tarsi, which are furnished for this purpose with stiff spikes that perform the office of rakes. The orifice must not only have the diameter of the miner’s body: it must also be able to admit a capture of large bulk. It is an instance of admirable foresight. As the Cerceris goes deeper into the earth, she casts out the rubbish: this forms the heap which I likened above to a tiny mole-hill. The gallery is not perpendicular, for then it would inevitably become blocked up, owing either to the wind or to other causes. Not far from where it starts, it forms an angle; its length is seven or eight inches. At the end of the passage the industrious mother establishes the cradles of her offspring. These consist of five separate cells, independent of one another, arranged in a semicircle and hollowed into the shape and nearly the size of an olive. Inside, they are polished and firm. Each of them is large enough to contain three Buprestes, which form the usual allowance for each larva. The mother lays an egg in the middle of the three victims and then stops up the gallery with earth, so that, when the victualling of the whole brood is finished, the cells no longer communicate with the outside. ‘Cerceris bupresticida must be a dexterous, daring, and skilful huntress. The cleanliness and freshness of the Buprestes whom she buries in her lair incline one to believe that she must seize these Beetles at the moment when they are leaving the wooden galleries in which their final metamorphosis has taken place. But what inconceivable instinct urges her, a creature that lives solely on the nectar of flowers, to procure, in the face of a thousand difficulties, animal food for carnivorous children which she will never see, and to take up her post on utterly dissimilar trees, which conceal deep down in their trunks the insects destined to become her prey? What yet more inconceivable entomological judgment lays down the strict law that she shall confine herself in the choice of her victims to a single generic group and capture specimens differing greatly among themselves in size, shape, and colour? For observe, my friend, how slight the resemblance is between Buprestis biguttata, with a long, slender body and a dark colour; B. octoguttata, oval-oblong, with great patches of a beautiful yellow on a blue or green ground; and B. micans, who is three or four times the size of B. biguttata and glitters with a metallic lustre of a fine golden green.