It is in the subsoil that they establish themselves and travel to and fro;
with the help of their powerful mandibles, their hard cranium, their
strong, prickly legs, they easily make themselves paths in the loose earth.
They are living ploughshares. By the end of August, therefore, the female
population is for the most part underground, busily occupied in egg-laying
and provisioning. Everything seems to tell me that I should watch in vain
for the appearance of a few females in the broad daylight; I must resign
myself to excavating at random.

The result was hardly commensurate with the labour which I expended on
digging. I found a few cocoons, nearly all broken, like the one which I
already possessed, and, like it, bearing on their side the tattered skin of
a larva of the same Scarabaeid. Two of these cocoons which are still intact
contained a dead adult Wasp. This was actually the Two-banded Scolia, a
precious discovery which changed my suspicions into a certainty.

I also unearthed some cocoons, slightly different in appearance, containing
an adult inmate, likewise dead, in whom I recognized the Interrupted
Scolia. The remnants of the provisions again consisted of the empty skin of
a larva, also a Lamellicorn, but not the same as the one hunted by the
first Scolia. And this was all. Now here, now there, I shifted a few cubic
yards of soil, without managing to find fresh provisions with the egg or
the young larva. And yet it was the right season, the egg-laying season,
for the males, numerous at the outset, had grown rarer day by day until
they disappeared entirely. My lack of success was due to the uncertainty of
my excavations, in which I had nothing to guide me over the indefinite area
covered.

If I could at least identify the Scarabaeidae whose larvae form the prey of