FEBRUARY. 



43 



ROSE INSECTS. 



We are indebted to the Editor of the Gardeners' Chronicle for the 

 following article, extracted from that popular journal, and also for 

 the use of the accompanying woodcut. The subject is one of no 

 common interest, and opens a wide field for observation. 



" If our readers will take the trouble to refer back to our volume for 1848, 

 p. 254, they will observe an article entitled the ' Florist and the Rose-maggot,' 

 requesting our particular attention to the history of this destructive insect, with 

 reference to the observations then recently published in the F/or?s^, and extracted 

 then into our columns of the same year, p. 191, announcing the discovery, in 

 little cylindrical burrows in the dead "snags of Rose-bushes, of the winter-quarters 

 of a small black-headed maggot, which was therein asserted to be the young 

 state of the Rose-maggot (a term applied, by the way, to the larvee of any of the 

 numerous small species of moths which burrow into the Rose-bud and eat out 

 its heart). In a subsequent page (299) a woodcut is given of a Rose-snag cut 

 open, shewing a number of cells, each of which is said to have been the birth- 

 place of these destructive larva;. 



Since the pubhcation of thesa several notices, our attention has been directed 

 to this subject; and the result of our examinations renders it necessary for us to 

 advise the gardener not to cut oft" the dead ends of these snags ; since, although 

 in a very few instances we have met with the little black-headed maggot in ques- 

 tion, yet in the majority of cases we have found that the burrows are inhabited, 

 and, in fact, formed by a ditterent insect, whose economy is in the highest de- 

 gree singular, and which deserves the protection of the gardener, from the benefit 

 which it confers upon him by destroying great numbers of liis enemies, the plant- 

 lice. But this is not the whole of the result of our examinations, for we have 

 thereby picked up some facts in regard to the natural history of four or five other 

 species of insects inhabhing the same situation, the economy of which has hitherto 

 remained unknown, or has bathed the researches of entomologists ; so that we 

 may safely affirm that these Rose-snags offer a mine of interesting observation 

 to any person disposed to regard such investigations in their proper light. 



Cemonus unicolor, magnified and of the natural size, carrying an apliis in its mouth ; 

 together with a Rose snag cut open, shewing a provisioned cell, a cell with the full-grown 

 larva, and one with the insect in its cocoon. 



In the present article we shall confine ourselves to the species which, from its 

 curious economy, may be aptly tenned the Aphis Sexton of the Rose-snags. 

 On the 20th of June, 1848, whilst looking over some standard Roses, to examine 



