1901 



ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



91 



CEcANTHUs NivEus, DeQeek, (The Tree Cricket.) 



This is an elegant creature well deserving of notice ; it is a little fairy robed in white — a 

 , dweller in the blossoms. 



The male Q^]canthu3 (Fig. 24, page 48) has transparent wing-covers rounded at the extrem- 

 ity and strongly veined. It is the combined friction and vibration of these veined wings that 

 produces the notes with which it serenades its mistress. 



The female (Fig. 25) has narrower wing-covers less strongly marked. Like a modest dam- 

 sel she holds her peace. 



These insects have ample and delicate hind wings, and long filiform antennae. Their hind- 

 most feet have four joints each — one more than we find in those of other crickets. 



The female has a short, stout ovipositor with which it pierces the twigs of fruit trees, rasp- 

 berry-canes, etc., and deposits her eggs in the wounds (Fig. 26). The young larv.-e appear at 

 .midsummer, and feed upon aphides and small fruit. 



Gryllotalpa borealis, Burmeister. (The Mole Cricket.) 



The prince of our Canadian crickets is the Mole Cricket. It is a rare insect with us ; but it 

 as common in some parts of the United States. In places where it abounds it has been found 

 mischievous. It burrows in the gardens, and eats the roots of newly 

 planted vegetables. 1,400 full grown mole crickets were once found on 

 a surface of two fifths of an acre that had been planted with cabbages.* 



Its disproportionately large front legs, its abbreviated wing covers, 

 its pleated wings extending to points beyond these, and the long tags with 

 which the body terminates give the mole cricket a strangely grotesque 

 appearance. 



The members first mentioned seemingly terminate in gauntleted 

 hands with the fingers extended. But these seeming terminations are 

 neither hands nor feet-they are the tibife or shanks of the front legs of the 

 insect. The small feet are attached to the outside of them. With these 

 shanks the cricket delves, and tunnels, and scoops out the chamber des- 

 tined to be the receptacle of its eggs When not in use these tibiae are 

 drawn back and protected by the femora. 



The length of the mole-cricket is about an inch and a quarter. Its 

 colour is light bay or fawn.t 



Much of our information upon the habits of the mole-cricket is de- 

 (Fig. 50. Mole Cricket, rived from the Rev. Gilbert White who wrote more than a hundred and 

 bwenty years ago. In his delightful "Natural History of Selborne ", he bells us that a gardener 

 mowing beside a canal, struck his scythe too deep, and pared away a sod, exposing a mole 

 cricket's nest and the approaches to it. " The nest was the size of a moderate snuflf-box, 

 f Within the secret nursery were deposited near a hundred eggs of a dirty yellow colour and 

 [enveloped in a tough skin." 



In Rennie's " Insect Architecture ", enlarged by Rev. J. G. Wood (Bell and Dalby, Lon- 



lon, 1869.), p. 266, a cut of the mole-cricket's nest and eggs is given. From this illustration 



^we should infer that the " tough skin " is not a sack enclosing the batch of eggs, but the 



[skin ot the eggs individually, for the eggs are represented as lying in an open pile on the floor of 



[the chamber. 



*Dr. Fletcher in 22nd Ann. Rep. Ent. Soc. of Ont., p. 89. 

 fHarris's Insects injurious to Vegetation, p. 149. 



