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Updated: May 9, 2025
Their illustrative beauty is enhanced by their wide variety, for they grade from counterparts of highly civilized men down to a savage among insects, such as the strictly solitary digger-wasp, whose instincts served to exemplify the insect type of "mentality" in the discussions of the preceding chapter.
A small digger-wasp likes this grass stem too, but instead of exchanging courtesies on the subject, the wasp proceeds to bite the ant's head off without ceremony, and continues sipping at the stem as though decapitation were a mere casual incident in its daily walk. On the same stem a big blowfly has alighted.
This worldly act has been progressing for some moments under the gaze of a big black digger-wasp, who now concludes to cut it short. When at close range with his prey, the fly suddenly discovers the unhealthy location which he occupies, and actually protruding his tongue by way of parting salute, he is off with a buzz.
Here, for instance, was an overwhelming contingent of the whole tough gang of wasps and hornets brown wasps from under the eaves and fences; black hornets from the big paper nests; yellow-jackets from where you please; deep steel-blue wire-waisted wasps from the mud cells in the garret, to say nothing of an occasional longer-waisted digger-wasp, and a host of their allied lesser associates scattered around generously among the assemblage.
On the 16th of July, 1883, I was digging, with my son Émile, in the sandy heap where, a few days earlier, I had been observing the labours and the surgery of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. My purpose was to collect a few cocoons of this Digger-wasp. The cocoons were turning up in abundance under my pocket-trowel, when Émile presented me with an unknown object.
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