338 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



The male of this Pteromalus is a beautiful pale-green fly, with 

 tyie body finely punctured and emitting metallic tints ; the ab- 

 domen, or hind body, is flat, in dried specimens with a deep 

 crease along the middle of the upper side, and it is much lighter 

 in color and with more decided metallic reflections than in the 

 rest of the body. The antennae are honey yellow, with narrow 

 black wings. The legs are pale honey-yellow. It is .08 inch to 

 a tenth in length. 



The body of the female, which would be thought at first to 

 be an entirely different kind of insect, is much stouter, broader, 

 with a broader oval abdomen, ending in a very short ovipositor, 

 while the underside of the body near the base has a large coni- 

 cal projection. It is much duller green than the male, and the 

 body is more coarsely punctured. The scutellum of the meta- 

 thorax is regularly convex, not keeled, in both sexes. The 

 antennas are brown, and the legs brown, becoming pale towards 

 the ends, the ends of the femora being pale ; the tibiae pale- 

 brown in the middle, much paler at each end, while the tarsi 

 are whitish, though the tip of the last joint is dark. It is from 

 a line to a line and a third in length. It differs from Harris' 

 Pteromalus vanessce in the little piece known as the scutellum of 

 the metathorax being smooth, not keeled, and by its darker legs. 



The larva is a little white maggot about a sixth (.17) of an 

 inch in length. The body consists of thirteen segments, exclu- 

 sive of the head, and is cylindrical, tapering rapidly towards the 

 head, while the end of the body is acutely pointed. The chrys- 

 alis is whitish, the limbs being folded along the under side of 

 the body, the antennae reaching to the end of the wings ; the 

 second pair of legs reaching half way between the end of the 

 wings and end of abdomen ; while the tips of the third pair of 

 feet reach half way between the second pair of feet and the end 

 of the abdomen. It is from a line to a line and a third in 

 length. 



In the middle of September Mr. F. W. Putnam handed me 

 one hundred and ten chrysalids, all but two of which were in- 

 fested by these parasites in both the larval and pupal states ; 

 while from other chrysalids the adult chalcid flies were emerging. 

 They continued to emerge until late in the autumn. The in- 

 fested chrysalids of the butterfly could be easily distinguished by 

 the livid and otherwise discolored and diseased appearance of 



