http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2433958

Wasps social and solitary

"This book on wasps is revised and enlarged with much new material and many new illustrations. It is a wonderful record of patient, exact, and loving observation, which has all the interest of a romance. I had not reckoned with the Peckhams and their solitary wasps. The solitary ways of these insects seem to bring out their individual traits, and they differ one from another, more than any other wild creatures known to me. It has been thought that man is the only tool-using animal, yet here is one of these wasps, Ammophila, that uses a little pebble to pound down the earth over her nest. She takes the pebble in her mandibles, as you or I would take a stone in our hand, and uses it as a hammer to pound down the soil above the cavity that holds her egg. This is a remarkable fact; so far as I know there is no other animal on this continent that makes any mechanical use of an object or substance foreign to its own body in this way. The act stamps Ammophila as a tool-using animal"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

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