THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 391 



stalks and unfold their blossoms for gauze-winged \isitors to 

 gather nectar from beneath the July sun. 



Here, along the right of way, grows wild Asparagus, and on it 

 you will find at least one species of the Asparagus beetle, which 

 we shall take to stand for Tribe III. The first specimens I ever 

 saw of this beetle were in a Kentish garden; they belonged to the 

 species commonly known as the striped asparagus beetle, and at 

 first I did not recognize the insect — all I had by way of guide was 

 an old book of Stevens with coloured illustrations that were several 

 times magnified. The picture showed a gorgeous insect, in rich 

 dark green and cream hues, which to my excited imagination must 

 be nearly as large as a June Bug. I found , however, to do the old 

 naturalist justice, that though in tlie dead insect the sutural stripe, 

 the basal marks and the cross-bar on the elytra appear black on a 

 ground colour of opaque straw-yellow — in life these colours are a 

 rich, vivid, dark green, on a ground colour of translucent cream, 

 extremely beautiful when scanned with a lens. The 12-spotted 

 species, which seems the commoner in Ontario and is apparently 

 more hardy, I first found in the late Dr. Brodie's back garden in 

 Toronto. Until five or six years ago neither species had made its 

 way to Port Hope, but the spotted one appeared in several gardens 

 then, followed a season or two later by the striped, and two seasons 

 ago I first found the Crioceris duodecim pun data on wild asparagus. 

 There is only one other genus in this tribe — the Lema, of which 

 there are no less than 16 species in North America, only a few 

 occur in Ontario, and I have only found one — Lema trilineata, a 

 beetle which sometimes shares with one of the Blister beetles the 

 title of "the old-fashioned Potato Beetle"; it feeds on \-arious 

 plants of the Potato family, and I have found it in some abund- 

 ance on the Physalus or Ground Cherry, while searching vainly for 

 specimens of Coptocycla clavata, the Rough Tortoise Beetle. Be- 

 fore we leave the asparagus and return to our little brook a mile 

 north, I may mention that it was on some garden Asparagus at 

 Lakefield that I found my reward for a day's umpiring at a cricket 

 match, in the shape of a beetle called Anomoea latidavia. This 

 is the only species in the IVth Tribe known to me; for though North 

 America has seven genera in the tribe and over 20 species, there 

 are but four genera represented in Canada, each by a single species. 



