336 LIFE STORIES OF AUSTRALIAN INSECTS. 



salt water of the rock pools, as they fall ofi into 

 the water. 



Rase Chafers. — These are mostly easily recog- 

 nised by the shortening of the sides of the wing 

 covers like a "cut-away coat." In some of these 

 scarabs the lamellae or plates of the antennae are 

 very flat and long. In living beetles the plates 

 can be seen clearly — they usually close together on 

 the death of the beetle. The plates are especially 

 large in some species of the humming rose chafer, 

 Diaphonia, the brownish-yellow beetle with black 

 marking which buzzes into the garden and bumps up 

 against one in the hot summer day. There is always 

 a certain amount of clumsy recklessness suggested 

 to us in the flight of this beetle. 



Another common bush rose chafer is the genus 

 Cacochroa, which is very common in flowers ; it 

 varies from black to light brown in colour and 

 has very short wing-covers. 



"The Fiddler Beetle" (Plate 29, Fig. i) (Etipoe- 

 cila australiasiae) belongs to this group, and is a 

 very gay individual with pale green markings 

 over its deep brown coat. In September we found 

 at Tuggerah Lakes a number of the cocoons of 

 these beetles in the base of a living but 

 hollowed gum tree. There were nearly twenty of 

 the mud cocoons. They looked very curious, some- 

 what like the mud cells of the mud-dauber wasp, 

 only they were not attached firmly to each other. 

 The larvae in forming the cocoon had worked 

 in numerous little excretion pellets on the outside 

 of the cocoon, making the cell look like a mud- 

 dauber's large cell. We gently opened the cocoons 



