digger-wasps

Very soon several congregated about the spot and commenced digging with their fore feet, after the manner of digger-wasps, throwing the earth backward.

Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 of Popular Literature and Science Various

These babies like tender, green inch-worms, so Mrs. Digger-Wasp hunts around until she finds a fat one, and then proceeds to paralyze it, so that it will stay quietly in the house until the babies are ready to eat it, for baby digger-wasps are little cannibals, preferring living caterpillars to any pre-digested spiders or flies.

Little Busybodies The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies Julia Moody 1919

The door closed, this is all the attention she gives to baby digger-wasps.

Little Busybodies The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies Julia Moody 1919

In my hand was a slender dogwood switch that I had been poking into the holes of the digger-wasps up the hillside.

Roof and Meadow Dallas Lore Sharp 1899

The ways of the digger-wasps of various species were familiar, but I now noted a feature of wasp-engineering which indeed seems to await its chronicler, as I find no mention of it by the wasp-historians.

My Studio Neighbors William Hamilton Gibson 1873