Dec., '07] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS 4 J 9 



A search for pupae in the leaves showing the effects of 

 larval feeding was entirely unsuccessful, and very few were 

 found in the large number of winter leaves examined; it was 

 not until a number of larva? had been kept in captivity that 

 the reason for this became apparent. In every case, these 

 larvae, when ready to spin, left the leaves in which they had 

 been feeding and hurried about their cage for half an hour 

 or more, before rinding a place to their liking. This was 

 usually a new and unfed-upon leaf, which they ceiled lightly 

 with silk, well down in the tube, spinning a flimsy, almost 

 transparent cocoon just below this web (Plate XVI, last fig- 

 ure). With this hint as to their habit, search in the field for 

 pupae was more successful. When a leaf containing no larva, 

 but showing evidence of continued feeding, was found, the 

 cocoon could frequently be located in an adjacent leaf show- 

 ing no trace of feeding; but isolated plants showing undoubted 

 evidence of having furnished food to one or more larvae, often 

 contained no cocoons in any of their leaves, indicating that the 

 larvae, in their wanderings, must frequently fail to find suit- 

 able leaves, and presumably spin their cocoon in the moss 

 and stubble which surround the growing plants. The instinct 

 to desert the leaf in which it has fed, and to spin its cocoon 

 where no trace of feeding will give a clue to its presence, no 

 doubt, in a measure protects this insect from the enemy so 

 fatal to the pupae of ridingsii, though many of the larger 

 leaves of minor are split open, evidently by the same bird 

 which reaps such a harvest in the thti'a leaves. This instinct 

 also probably aids it to escape destruction by the fires so fatal 

 to the larva; of ridingsii, otherwise the abundance of sciui- 

 crocca in tracts very thoroughly burned over, where no ridingsii 

 larvae survive, can scarcely be understood. 



The first pupae of the spring brood were noted May iQth, 

 at which time many very young larvae were still in the leaves. 

 The pupal period varied from fifteen to eighteen days, but 

 may have been extended by removal to a colder climate. The 

 earliest emergence was recorded June isl, and the latest from 

 this brood, not until July nth, so that undoubtedly the later 

 broods overlap more or less with those of ridingsii. The 



