1909.] 237 



Per contra I have twice seen Vane.isa urticFe, Linn., at night about the lamps 

 in this house. — G. B. Longstaff, Twitchen, Mortchoe, R.S.O., North Devon : 

 August 20th, 1909. 



Further notes on Olethreutes bifasclana, Hio. — I regret to find that the altera- 

 tions that I made in the revise of my notes on this species {antea, pp. 198 — 201) 

 were not carried out. The only important ones were the substitution of an accurate 

 sentence for the original inaccurate one that concluded my notes on the larva on 

 p. 199, and the correction of " adbominal " on p. 200 (line 3, word 5) to '■ abdo- 

 minal." The published sentence in question makes me responsible for the statement 

 that, with two possible exceptions, I have never taken the moth where Finns pinaster 

 has been absent. Before the revise reached me, however, further examination of 

 a wood in which the imago has sometimes occurred to me, and the identification 

 of the pines therein, liad shown this to be incorrect, for the only species of Pinus 

 glowing there are laricio and sylvestris, both of which are abundant. It may well 

 be, therefore, that the larva feeds there on the male catkins of the latter tree, which 

 Barrett [Lep. Brit. Isl., xi, 67 (1907)] has recoi-ded as a food-plant, but which I 

 iiave never closely searclied for it. All the larvse of O. hifaxciana collected by 

 nie have come oif the same individual of P. pinaster that has yielded me the 

 larvae of E. sylvestrana, and the various batches of larvte of the former that have 

 reached me from Bournemouth, for all of which I am indebted to Mr. McRae, have 

 been feeding in male catkins of this tree, which the insect seems greatly to prefer 

 to /'. sylvestris. As stated above, the late Mr. C. Gr. Barrett bred this species as 

 well as E. sylvestrana from the male catkins of P. ^i«as<er that he received from 

 Bournemouth through Mr. McEae, and since the only food-plants that he records 

 (I. c.) are P. sylvestris and pinea, it seems evident that he mistook pinaster for 

 pinta, and that his record should not be accepted without confirmation. 



Witi) reference to my statement {anted, p. 201) that, in the Bournemouth 

 district, 0. bifasciana has greatly increased in numbers during recent years, whilst 

 E. sylvestrana has markedly decreased, some correspondence with Mr. McRae has 

 elicited the following interesting information. When Mr. McRae first collected male 

 catkins of P. pinaster at Bournemouth in 1884, among the moths that appeared 

 from them, E. sylvestrana outnumbered O. bifasciana by about ten to one. He 

 frequently bred both species between then and 1896 or 1897, by which time the 

 former had become so much scarcer, and the latter so much commoner, that the 

 proportion mentioiied above had become more than reversed in favour of O. 

 bifasciana over E. sylvestrana ! It is particularly noteworthy that the P. pinaster 

 catkins that yielded these species were collected by Mr. McRae not only in the same 

 spot, but also, for the most part, from the same individual trees. — Eustace K. 

 Bankes, Norden, Corfe Castle : September \6th, 1909. 



Osmia xanthomelana and other Aculeates at Shanklin, Isle of Wight. — I was 

 at Shanklin for the end of April and beginning of May this year, and collected such 

 Aculeates as I was able to find ; at first, Andrena albicans simply swarmed in the 

 garden of the house we were staying in, and its inquiline, Nomada bifida, was 

 fairly common too j I only mention this as the other spring species of Andrena 



