Oct., '09] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS 363 



Notes and News. 



ENTOMOLOGICAL GLEANINGS FROM ALL QUARTERS 

 OF THE GLOBE. 



DOCTOR PHILIP P. CALVERT writes as follows from Costa Rica : By 

 such papers as have reached us, I see that yon have had a much hotter 

 summer in Philadelphia than we have had here in Cartago. For July 

 and August we are keeping a record of temperatures given by our self- 

 recording maximum and minimum thermometer, and the maximum has 

 never yet reached 80 in the shade. In the low country of course it is 

 hotter. 



Mr. William Schaus has been of great assistance to me in giving infor- 

 mation about favorable collecting places, etc. He expects to go to 

 Washington in September next and to London about Christmas, to work 

 up his book on Costa Rican Lepidoptera, based on his collections of the 

 last three years. It will be a very extensive list much exceeding the 

 Biologia. He has done so much that it seems hardly worth while for 

 anyone else to touch Lepidoptera here. 



Since writing you in May, I have made trips to Guapiles, Guacino, 

 Juan Vinas, Turrialba, Tierra Blanca, Volcano of Irazu and El Alto, rep- 

 resenting elevations from 350 to 11,000 feet above sea level. So far I 

 have not been able to find Odonata above 6400 feet, though you took 

 them at n.ooo feet in Colorado, and Van Ostrand and I at 8600 and 9000 

 feet in Mexico. Some days we spend almost exclusively in looking for 

 Odonate larvae and have succeeded in finding those of some genera 

 whose larvae were previously unknown. In many groups of plants and 

 of animals we see interesting things and of some of them we have photo- 

 graphs from life. Altogether we are enjoying our study of Costa Rica 

 very much. 



Osinia tnandibularis Cresson. In my list of the bees of New 

 Mexico (Trans. Am. Ent. Soc., 1906, p. 305). I cited a species of 

 Osinia from Rociada, which I had formerly recorded as O. inandihii- 

 luris, but which Mr. Titus, having seen Cresson's type, held to he 

 distinct and undescribed. Today, at Boulder, Colorado, 1 dug out 

 from a bank a cluster of old Osinia nests, containing some dead speci- 

 mens of the bees. The first one I examined proved, to my delight, 

 to be a genuine female O. inandibitlaris, with enormous basal pro- 

 cesses on the mandibles. The Rociada insect, compared with this, 

 has the processes very greatly reduced, hut is in other respects the 

 same. As Mr. Titus suggested, it looks like a distinct species ; but I 

 find among my Boulder specimens one which is of much smaller 

 size than the type with the mandibular processes greatly reduced. 

 As this small specimen is in other respects a tnandibularis, and as it 

 came from the same group of nests, it is evident that O. iiuindibii- 

 laris is a very variable species, and that the Rociada specimens In-long 

 to it after all. 



