Let us take no notice of the repeated trips, the fruitless searches, the tedium of frequent long waiting, but rather present the Sphex suddenly to the reader as she herself appears to the observer. Here she is, at the bottom of a sunken road with high, sandy banks. She comes on foot, but gets help from her wings in dragging her heavy prize. The Ephippiger’s antennæ, long and slender as threads, are the harnessing-ropes. Holding her head high, she grasps one of them in her mandibles. The antenna gripped passes between her legs; and the game follows, turned over on its back. Should the soil be too uneven and so offer resistance to this method of carting, the Wasp clasps her unwieldy burden and carries it with very short flights, interspersed, as often as possible, with journeys on foot. We never see her undertake a sustained flight, for long distances, holding the game in her legs, as is the practice of those expert aviators, the Bembeces and Cerceres, for instance, who bear through the air for more than half a mile their respective Flies or Weevils, a very light booty compared with the huge Ephippiger. The overpowering weight of her capture compels the Languedocian Sphex to make the whole, or nearly the whole, journey on foot, her method of transport being consequently slow and laborious. The same reason, the bulk and weight of the prey, have entirely reversed the usual order which the Burrowing Wasps follow in their operations. This order we know: it consists in first digging a burrow and then stocking it with provisions. As the victim is not out of proportion to the strength of the spoiler, it is quite simple to carry it flying, which means that the Wasp can choose any site that she likes for her dwelling. She does not mind how far afield she goes for her prey: once she has captured her quarry, she comes flying home at a speed which makes questions of distance quite immaterial. Hence she prefers as the site for her burrow the place where she herself was born, the place where her forbears lived; she here inherits deep galleries, the accumulated work of earlier generations; and, by repairing them a little, she makes them serve as approaches to new chambers, which are in this way better protected than they would be if they depended upon the labours of a single Wasp, who had to start boring from the surface each year. This happens, for instance, in the case of the Great Cerceris and the Bee-eating Philanthus. And, should the ancestral abode not be strong enough to withstand the rough weather from one year to the next and to be handed down to the offspring, should the burrower have each time to start her tunnelling afresh, at least the Wasp finds greater safety in places consecrated by the experience of her forerunners. Consequently she goes there to dig her galleries, each of which serves as a corridor to a group of cells, thus effecting an economy in the aggregate labour expended upon the whole business of the laying.