Photo by W. P. Dando, F.Z.S.] [Regent's Park.
ICHNEUMON-FLY.
One of the largest British species of a very extensive group of parasitic insects.
The group of stinging insects begins with the Ants, which are probably the most intelligent animals now living in the world. Different species, however, differ very much in their manners and customs, and in the grade of civilisation to which they have attained. Some of the more industrious among them keep other insects as cattle, and even as pets; others harvest grain, while a few species cultivate grain for their own use; and others make large mushroom-beds of comminuted leaves, and thus do great harm to cultivated trees in many parts of tropical America. When the industrious ants are not too busy, they sometimes indulge in sports and pastimes. But there are some species which live in idle communities. Such ants are only energetic as marauders, and are so degraded that they cannot even feed themselves, and starve to death if they are deprived of the services of their black slaves, which have been carried off as pupæ by the others in piratical raids, and brought up by other slaves, which do all the work in the nests of their captors.
Quitting the Ants, we arrive at a rather extensive series of insects of moderate or considerable size, and with very spiny legs, called Burrowing-wasps. They are brightly coloured, active insects, and generally dig holes in the ground, which they provision with caterpillars, grasshoppers, or spiders, which they paralyse with their stings, and leave in a moribund condition to form the food of their progeny. They are generally winged in both sexes, but in one family the females are stout and very hairy, and look like large hairy ants, while the males are slender winged insects, very unlike their partners. In the burrowing-wasps the front of the thorax, or second division of the body, is usually transverse, and often narrow; but in the True Wasps it bends back to the wings. Among these latter it is only the small group of the Social Wasps which are gregarious, and among which we find workers as well as males and females. The largest of the British wasps is the Hornet; but there are several much larger species in the East Indies, some of which are black and yellow, like the Chinese Mandarin-wasp, the largest of all, which often measures 2 inches across the wings. Others are black, with one large reddish band on the abdomen. Their nests, which they construct of a kind of paper, are formed in a hole in the ground, in a hollow tree, or in a bush, or under the eaves of a house. A nest is commenced by a single female which has survived the winter, and is afterwards enlarged by the exertions of her progeny.
RUBY-TAILED FLY.
Generally of a brilliant metallic green or blue.
