16 NEW ZEALAND ENTOMOLOGY. 



The cages I have been in the habit of using are made of 

 two or three thicknesses of cardboard bent round into a 

 cylinder and strongly pasted together. They may be of 

 various sizes, from three to four inches in diameter up to 

 eight or ten, and constructed so that one will go inside 

 the other. The height should exceed the diameter by 

 about one and a half inches. The cylinders should be made 

 so as to stand exactly level on a flat surface, and they 

 should have two rows of small openings round the sides for 

 the admission of air. It is a good plan to have four of these 

 openings in each row and place them opposite one another. 

 They should be covered on the inside with gauze, stiffened 

 with green or brown paint, as the dark colour will enable 

 the observer to see inside more readily. A circular piece 

 of glass is fitted into the upper end of the cylinder, and 

 fixed by means of paste and paper. The base of the 

 cage consists of two round pieces of wood, one about 

 half an inch smaller than the other, the smaller one nailed 

 exactly in the centre of the larger piece. These are made 

 so that the cardboard cylinder fits accurately on the out- 

 side of the smaller piece of wood. The whole cage is 

 then neatly covered with white paper inside and brown out- 

 side. A complete view of the interior can of course be 

 obtained by looking in at the top, while the cages can be 

 stowed away one within the other when not in use. A 

 stone ink-bottle should be put on the floor of each cage 

 and filled with water, into which a sprig of the food-plant 

 can be introduced. Care must be taken to plug up the 

 mouth of the bottle, so that the larvae may not crawl down 

 the stem of the plant into the water and thus meet with an 

 untimely end. This may readily be done by means of a 

 cork with a hole bored in it for the stem to pass through, 

 or a plug of moss or blotting-paper. Members of almost 

 all the orders can be reared in these cages, as jam-pots full 

 of earth may easily be introduced, in the place of the stone 



