448 . THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



longer. The well-known stories, most of them authentic, about the mature 

 insect escaping from tables and chair-legs several years after the manu- 

 facture of these articles, would thus illustrate an exceptional state of things 

 in which the larva was confronted prematurely with dry wood to feed on. 



Besides these captures on stumps and logs, I have made several by 

 using a similar trap, with fungus substituted for bark. But at present I 

 shall content myself in my closing paragraphs with a few general remarks 

 on the subject of blossoms, as a collecting ground for beetles. 



If you refer to any handbook of North American flora, you will find 

 about 130 natural orders of flowering plants. The vast majority of these, 

 however, do not offer their sweets (or pollen, rather) to those browsing 

 cattle among insects, the beetles, whose short jaws and general habits 

 incline them to visit only small shallow blossoms growing in close clusters 

 (racemes) or in flat bunches or heads. Nearly all the blossoms that form a 

 favourite haunt for beetles are included in the series between order 25 and 

 order 50, beginning with the sumach and the vine and ending with the 

 composites. The only important beetle-food outside that series, in my 

 experience, is the milkweed and its ally, the dogbane, which come about 

 No. 70 in the natural orders. 



If you look a little more closely at the series from 25 to 50, you will 

 find these fall into two distinct groups of eight, separated from each other 

 by a wall of ten consecutive orders unattractive to beetles. 



The first group extends from the poison ivy and the grapevine 

 through the New Jersey tea and the spiked maple to the great rose family. 

 Of these, the milkwort and the vetch, from the form of their blossom, are 

 valueless ; the poison ivy and the grapevine are fairly good, but the 

 range of their guests is limited. The New Jersey tea is a plant with hardly 

 a rival, both for range of species and for total number of insects. The 

 spiked maple is also a rich storehouse of beetles. In the rose family I 

 have found the hawthorn best, next to it the rose and the bramble, and 

 then the spireaea and the chokecherry. 



The second group of eight begins with the umbellifers, and passing 

 through the dogwood and the elder, closes with the great composite family. 

 Of these, the bedstraw, valerian and teasel are comparatively worthless ; 

 but the dogwood is an excellent host, and so are the two species of elder, 

 while several of the composites are worth careful scrutiny. 



