After the sixth fly was taken in we were afraid to let her go again, thinking that the nest must now be completely provisioned, and that she would not return. She was such a charming little wasp, scarcely bigger than a fly herself and yet so useful in her industry, that we hated to disturb her; but as we were obliged to have her for identification we first caught her, and then opened the nest. It contained only the flies that we had seen taken in, the egg being attached to the one lowest down, on the left side, between the head and the thorax. It was long and cylindrical. The flies were dead, but showed no marks of violence. We learned later that it takes Oxybelus two hours to make her nest so that this one must have been prepared the day before. The egg, which was laid just before nine o’clock on the morning of August seventh, hatched at a little after nine on the morning of August eighth. The larva began to eat at once, and devoured all the inside of the thorax and abdomen of the fly to which it was attached, in the first twenty–four hours. On August twelfth it had reached the sixth fly, and we supplied it with three more. On August fourteenth these were gone, and we again replenished its larder, this time with two flies. The larva had partly eaten these when something went wrong. Its appetite failed, and on August sixteenth it died. On further acquaintance this wasp lost none of her charm,—indeed, she gained in interest from the almost human curiosity that she showed about the affairs of other people. Where several were living close together one of them would sometimes stop digging her own nest to perch on a weed and watch the labor of another, and we once saw an especially inquisitive character burrow through the closed door and enter the home of her next–door neighbor. [Illustration: NEST OF OXYBELUS]