406 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



bulbous feet and slender, hairy body, ending in two long fila 

 ments. Many of the members of the Society have listened quite 

 recently to a most interesting paper on a species of this family of 

 the genus Xenos, by Mr. H. G. Hubbard, from which it appears 

 that one reason why the males in the family are so rarely seen is 

 on account of their ephemeral nature and their short and intensive 

 flight during the early morning hours. 



To go somewhat more into detail, the Stylopid triungulin 

 hatches within the body of the degraded, bottle-shaped female, 

 crawls on to other wasps, and while thus moving about over the 

 nest drops into a cell containing a wasp larva, into which it then 

 eats its way. It soon loses legs and anal filaments with the first 

 molt, retaining only tubercles in place of legs and becoming 

 stationary, and nourishing on the adipose tissue of the wasp larva 

 without destroying this last, however. When the wasp larva 

 has completed its transformations, the Stylops larva works its 

 way to near the surface, generally between two of the abdominal 

 joints of its host, and assumes the cylindrical coarctate larva state, 

 if a male, or remains soft and larviform, if a female The male 

 transformations are undergone within the coarctate larva, while 

 the female is stationary beneath the chitinous body wall of the 

 wasp. She protrudes, however, the tip of her body, which is 

 chitinous, blunt-pointed, flattened and scale-like, and which has 

 generally been assumed to be the head, though containing the 

 genital opening, as Mr. Hubbard has shown. 



Connecting these strange Stylopids with the more normal Co- 

 leoptera are the species of the family Rhipiphoridae. Of the life- 

 history of Rhipiphorus proper we know as yet comparatively lit 

 tle. As already recorded, I have reared Rhipiphorus pectinatus 

 from the cocoons of Jiphia inornata, this last being parasitic on 

 Lachnosterna larvae. Rhipiphorus is, therefore, in this case, a 

 secondary parasite. Both sexes are here free and winged, and 

 while nothing is definitely known of the early larval history the 

 probabilities are that the eggs are laid on plants or in regions 

 frequented by the Tiphia, and that the first larva is an active 

 triungulin and is carried into the ground by the female wasp ; 

 further, that it is an external rather than an internal feeder, and 

 that it does not kill its victim until this last has spun its cocoon. 



Metoecus paradoxus is also perfectly developed in both sexes. 



