$4 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [April 



tions of leaves upon the ground, the long handles armed with 

 knife-like points are so interwoven, that it is a severe task to 

 overturn them. I found no living specimen of I) hi a pate in 

 any stage, but I uncovered a dead and disintegrated specimen 

 of this gigantic Bostrychid beetle lying between dead fans at 

 the foot of a young palm. Many of the old palms are uprooted 

 by the flood waters, and T saw probably .">(.) of these prostrate 

 trunks upon the ground. Almost all of them are perforated 

 all over, with round open holes, into most of which 1 can in- 

 sert the end of my thumb. Some of the holes will however 

 only admit the little finger. These holes evidently made by 

 Dhiapate larva- open directly into a huge pupa chamber which 

 is two inches long and lies vertically with the grain not more 

 than one or two inches from the surface. The remainder of 

 the gallery is solidly packed with sawdust and leads into such 

 a labyrinth of borings into the interior that most of the at- 

 tacked logs are completely riddled, and at the heart there is 

 very little of the original texture left. So solid is the saw- 

 dust, however, that these bored logs hardly lose any of their 

 strength and, in fact, are used as gate posts at several of the 

 ranches and at the hotel at the Springs, where the people 

 think the holes are made by carpenter bees (Xylocopa). It is 

 very certain that a log once vacated by a colony of I.) hi a pate 

 is never afterwards entered or again attacked by them. I 

 should say that most of the logs showed from 100 to 250 exit 

 holes of the beetle, and, at the time of emergence, the person 

 lucky enough to discover such a colony would find no difficulty 

 in filling several Mason jars with the beetles. Of course, until 

 they begin to emerge, there is no sign upon the outside of the 

 'presence of the insects within a palm trunk. I could find no 

 trace of the living larvae and heard no sound of them in un- 

 perforated logs. 



Dr. Murray, the landlord of this little hotel, tells me that 

 Mr. Wright comes almost every year in September to this 

 place and always goes without a word up the canon, so that no 

 one here has ever heard of the existence of DhmjHitc. I could 

 easily trace the operations of Mr. Wright among the fallen 

 palm trunks. He has even cut down a number of the largest 

 and tallest trees, no doubt in the hope of attracting the beetles 

 to the fresh cut timber. But these logs lay upon the ground 



