The work of bringing in beetles goes on very irregularly, and as a rule not more than two or three are stored in the course of a day. It is not unusual for clypeata to spend three or four hours away from home and then come back without anything; and often, even in the middle of the day, she passes an hour or two in the seclusion of her nest. We had several nests under observation for a week at a time without ever once seeing the owners, although they were evidently occupied, since they were sometimes open and sometimes closed. The outer entrance is always left open when the wasp goes away, although possibly access to the pockets may be barred below; but when she enters she closes the door unless she means to come out again at once. The closing is sometimes effected by pushing the earth up backwards, with the end of the abdomen; but the hole is rather too large for this method, and more frequently the wasp comes up head first, carrying a load of earth in her front legs. This is placed just within and to one side of the entrance, and then more armfuls are brought up, until, after two or three trips, the opening is entirely filled. We once captured the wasp in a bottle, as she returned, loaded, to the nest. She dropped the beetle, but soon picked it up again and stung it vigorously, _with intention_, as the French say, first under the neck, and then further back, behind the first pair of legs. After this it was dropped while the wasp fluttered about for a few minutes, but it was then picked up again, and stung as before. We both saw this operation repeated in exactly the same way, four different times, with intervals of five or six minutes between. In a nest which we excavated after watching it for nine days, we found nothing until we had gone six inches down, and at this point the tunnel was lost; but mixed with the crumbly earth that we took out of the hole, we found eight beetles and a half–grown larva of clypeata. The destruction of this nest was accomplished one morning, and when we came back to the spot twenty–four hours later we found that a new one had been made close by, doubtless by the same individual. We had expected to find her bringing beetles and dropping them foolishly on the ground like Paul Marchal’s Cerceris ornata, and were gratified that she showed an advance in intelligence over that species, although to be sure she would have been still wiser had she chosen an entirely new neighborhood. Another individual was so much disturbed by our scrutiny that she dropped her beetle at the entrance to her nest. She did not pick it up again and utilize it, although it lay for three days in the dust at the threshold.