€lxt (Haim^mii ^itteittajljt^jst 



Vol. LII. LONDON. OCTOBER, 1920. No. 8 



POPULAR AND PRACTICAL ENTOMOLOGY. 

 Some Winter Insect Life. 



by ralph hopping, 



Vernon, B. C. 



The cabin was a ranger station in the foothills of the Sierras, five miles from 

 a small town called Dunlop, in Fresno County, California. In August the 

 hillside close to the northern side of the cabin was dry, the grass was yellow, 

 and even the brush a few rods away had a parched look. No insect life stirred 

 in the dry, hot atmosphere. The winter rains, however, changed all this. By 

 February everything was transformed. The hillside close to the cabin was 

 green and numerous flowers were beginning to bloom everywhere. A great 

 many insect holes appeared among the grass stems. These were of various 

 shapes and sizes. The ranger, who was also an entomologist, was curious. 

 So one Sunday, assisted by his deputy, an investigation began. Ant hills were 

 common. The unknown possesses a lure much greater than the known. We 

 merely noted that two species had homes on the hillside. Four other varieties 

 of freshly-made holes invited our attention. Two were about three-eighths 

 of an inch across with ant-like mounds around the entrance. The earth pellets, 

 however, were of two kinds, one fine and granular, the other conglomerate, 

 irregular masses composed of twelve to twenty grains of earth. The former 

 proved to be a spider. Spiders are "common" to a coleopterist. We were not 

 interested. The latter type of hole, however, produced a female Bradycinetus 

 horni, Rivers. The next hole produced a male. Once we found the male 

 and female in the same hole. In all we collected thirty-two specimens in holes 

 of varying depths of from six to twelve inches. This is a rare species. We 

 almost forgot the other holes, one of which was a horizontal slit in the hillside 

 about three-eighths of an inch high and one and a fourth to one and a half 

 inches in length. On the lower edge extended the "dump" of fine particles of 

 earth, much like that at the mouth of a mining tunnel. These slits were not few. 

 They existed in hundreds. Exploring the mountainside in all directions gave 

 the same result. They were everywhere. The burrows extended horizontally 

 an inch or two, and then perpendicularly for about eight inches. We explored 

 half a dozen and each gave up a nice, fat blue-black scorpion. Thousands in 

 our dooryard and we had lived there two years and had not seen them! W^e 

 still had one other variety of hole. This was larger than any we had explored, 

 about an inch across. One to one and a half inches below the suiface the hole 

 was plugged with earth. This plug was one to two inches thick. Below was 

 an opening, a hole somewhat larger in diameter than the portion above the 

 plug. We followed the hole down twenty-eight inches and found a round, fat, 

 female Pleocoma fimbriala, Lee. She was reddish in colour, shiny, and lay on 

 her back feebly waving her legs. That day we dug twenty-four from a varying 



217 



