TIIE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 15 



host of others ever running about, looking for stray objects of this sort on 

 "which to make a dainty meal. 



I had observed on one of the bushes, before applying the hellebore, some 

 friends at work on these worms. The were immature specimens of a true 

 bug belonging to the order Hemiptera, and probably the young of Strietus 

 fimhrlatus. These creatures are nearly round, about the size of a common 

 lady-bird, having the head, thorax and legs black, and the abdomen red with 

 an elongated black spot in the centre, divided across by a whitish line. 

 Approaching a caterpillar, they thrust their proboscis into it and quietly suck 

 its juices until it becomes so weak and exhausted that it shrivels up and dies. 

 With the view of testing the probable amount of good these friends were 

 thus capable of accomplishing, I shut up two of them in a small box, with a 

 dozen nearly full grown caterpillars, and at the end of three days found that 

 they had consumed them all ; also six in another box with one bug, and in 

 this instance the rate of consumption was about the same, two caterpillars a 

 day for each of these little creatures. The second time I fed them they did 

 not get through their work quite so quickly; possibly they may have overfed 

 themselves at first. 



While turning up the branches of some of my gooseberry bushes, I ob- 

 served a number of whitish eggs on some of the leaves, arranged lengthwise 

 in regular rows at short distances apart, on the principal veins or ribs of the 

 leaf. Usually they were placed singly in the rows, but here and there double. 

 These were the eggs of the currant worm, they were about one twentieth of 

 an inch long, four times as long as broad, rounded at each end with a whitish 

 glossy surface. On the branch I was examining there were three leaves with 

 these eggs on ; two of them had their principal veins pretty well covered, 

 while the third had but a few on it, as if this had been the work of a single 

 insect who had exhausted her stock before the third leaf was covered. I 

 counted these, and found there were 101 in all. Having just then caught 

 one of the parent flies, a female who was hovering about as if looking for a 

 place on which to deposit her eggs, I squeezed some eggs out of her body 

 and comparing them with those on the leaf, found they were only about half 

 the size, showing that the first must have grown considerably after being laid 

 and that they were probably nearly ready to hatch. In about three hours 

 afterwards, I observed that several of the young larvae had come out of the 

 eggs, and placing the leaf under a microscope had the good fortune to see 

 some of them escape. The egg consisted of a thin elastic membrane suffi- 

 ciently transparent to give a dim view of the enclosed larva. The black spot 

 which is placed on each side of the head in this species, enabled me to deter- 

 mine the position the cieature occupied. It was somewhat coiled up and 

 resting on its side with its jaws against the side of the egg not far from its 



