The Accessory Burrows of Digger Wasps

Abstract

Solitary wasps are unpopu-lar subjects for study for several reasons, chief among which is the fact that they cannot be handled effectively in the laboratory. Possibly some day suitable techniques will be found, but even then it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce an entire community. This means that the advantage of working under controlled conditions will be offset by the disadvantage of obtaining partial and sometimes irrelevant answers, for no organism (least of all its behavior) can be fully understood apart from its environment. As William Morton Wheeler said many years ago (18), "natural history constitutes the perennial root-stock or stolon of biological science." That this is inevitably so is possibly a nuisance, for nothing is more difficult than working amid the confusion of species and profusion of behaviors occurring in every natural situation. Unfortunately there is no such thing as an "''unimportant" species or as behavior which is "trivial"[long dash]or at least we have no a priori basis for concluding that there is. This means that the answer to even relatively simple questions[long dash]such as, Why accessory burrows?[long dash]may require an incredibly large number of descriptive data, often obtainable only under uncom fortable and frustrating circumstances. That biology has become a more and more highly sophisticated laboratory science is admirable, but that it has become less and less a field science is regrettable. As Konrad Lorenz has said (19), "the immense field of observation which is still waiting to be systematically exploited needs whole armies of investigators." There is no draft for the armies Lorenz visualizes, but one hopes that from the current flood of talent there will be many enlistments, and that a few platoons will eventually turn their attention to some of the many problems in wasp behavior, a front now manned by a t ragged militiamen.