How much livelier and more interesting it would have been if we could have followed her! We tried to guess at what she was doing, and imagined her hunting industriously. After fifteen or twenty minutes it seemed to us that she must have caught something, and that she was surely returning. Most probably she was not working at all, but was breakfasting leisurely and exchanging compliments with her neighbors; for when she did come home after keeping us waiting for an hour and a half, she brought nothing with her, and seemed quite unconscious of the fact that greater things had been expected of her.
We had placed a stone upon a dead leaf near by, to mark the neighborhood of the nest, thinking that even a Cerceris could not object to so simple an arrangement of natural objects; but our wasp noticed it at once, and evidently with much suspicion and disapproval. She began by circling several times just above it. Then she alighted on it and examined it carefully, walking over it, and creeping underneath, perhaps to see whether it in any way menaced the safety of her nest, perhaps as the completion of a locality study made the day before. She then rose on her wings, and after a little more circling, dropped suddenly into her hole.
So far we had not been getting on very rapidly, but from this time things took a turn. Cerceris is never in a hurry, and yet she may be relied upon to do a certain amount of work every day. The one that we were now watching had probably come back for a final look at her newly made nest before beginning to provision it; for she soon reappeared, and this time really went to work, since in forty minutes she brought home a beetle which she carried by the snout, venter up, in her mandibles, supporting it with the second pair of legs while flying. She was much annoyed at our presence, and circled about as before. Twice she alighted near by, and walked around for a few minutes, and when she did this all her feet came down to the ground, the beetle being allowed to hang loosely. At last she made the best of a bad matter, and went in. The rest of the morning was occupied with hunting, the capture of each beetle taking about forty–five minutes. Every time that she came home she spent fifteen or twenty minutes in the nest.