62 THE REPORT OF THE No. 19 



content myself in my closing paragraphs with a few general remarks on the 

 subject of blossoms, as a collecting ground for beetles. 



If you refer to any handbook of North American flora, you will find 

 about 130 natural orders of flowering plants. The vast majority of these, 

 however, do not offer their sweets (or pollen, rather) to those browsing cattle 

 among insects, the beetles, whose short jaws and general habit incline them 

 to visit only small shallow blossoms growing in close clusters (racemes) or in 

 flat bunches or heads. Nearly all the blossoms that form a favourite haimt 

 for beetles are included in the series between order 25 and order 50, begin- 

 ning with the sumach and the vine and ending with the composites. The 

 only important beetle-food outside that series in my experience, is the milk- 

 weed and its ally, the dogbane, which come about No. TO in the natural 

 oi^ders. 



If you look a little more closely at the series from 25 to 50, you will 

 find these fall into two distinct groups of eight, separated from each 

 other by a wall of 10 consecutive orders unattractive to beetles. 



The first group extends from the poison ivy and the grape vine, through 

 the New Jersey tea and the spiked maple to the great rose family. Of these, 

 the milkwort and the vetch, from the form of their blossoms, are valueless; 

 the poison ivy and the grape vine are fairly good, but the range of their 

 guests is limited. The New Jersey tea is a plant with hardly a rival, both 

 for range of species and for total number of insects. The spiked maple is 

 also a rich storehouse of beetles. In the rose family I have found the haw- 

 thorn best, next to it the rose and the bramble, and then the spiraea and the 

 choke cherry. 



The second group of eight begins with the umbellifers, and passing 

 through the dogwood and the elder, closes with the great composite family. 

 Of these the bed straw, valerian and teasel, are comparatively worthless; but 

 the dogwood is an excellent host and so are the two species of elder, while 

 several of the composites are worth careful scrutiny. 



I shall carry this principle of selection a little farther, by giving a 

 rough outline of a season's beetle collecting from blossoms. The first blos- 

 som to open is the early or red-berried elder (Sambucus pubens). It varies 

 considerably from season to season, as well as in any one season, owing to 

 differences of location ; but about the 10th of May it will be found flowering 

 and its season may last for ten days. It is immediately followed by the haw- 

 thorn, which lasts till, perhaps, the 10th of June. By this time the spiked 

 maple and the dogwoods are in flower, and before this last is over comes a 

 riot of blossom, for the late elder and the New Jersey tea both open in the 

 last days of June. 



These blossom haunts, then, extend from early in May till the middle 

 of July. The only other conditions of time that need be mentioned are that 

 the pollen on a given blossom must be in a certain state of ripeness or it does 

 not appear to attract beetles at all, and, as a rule, the sun must be shining 

 on the blossoms. If it is hot and calm besides, then you have ideal conditions. 



There is, however, an important condition of space to add to these of 

 time. I have, as a beginner, spent hours in fruitless search over whole 

 hedges and thickets of elder and bushes of hawthorn, when ten minutes at 

 a single shrub with only a few meagre blossoms on it would yield a rich 

 harvest. Why? Because the flowers must be growing near a thicket or a 

 wood. If they are in the open, even a hundred yards or so from timber 

 lands, they are almost useless. This is particularly the case when it is 

 longicorns you are on the look-out for. It is, of course, well-known to cole- 

 opterists of experience that a clearing or the border of a wood is the best 



