Notes on bueeding angerona prunaria. 14;") 



tiou, being ab that time tVoiu -loin, to •87i3iii. iu length ; the largei' larva' 

 I found later produced 2 s- 'i'o hybernate the larv* 1 found it best to 

 place several stems of privet in two or three narrow-necked bottles, which 

 were left in the breeding-cage ; the larvie are then able to nibble at the 

 leaves till new buds appear. Many larvse prefer to hide among the 

 dropped-oft' leaves, so that these are best left at the bottom of the cage, 

 and not removed, as they form a very suitable hiding-place ; some of 

 the larva' nibble at the stem, a habit common to many hybernatiiig 

 Geometrid larva'. Ivvperience shows that it is best to keep the cages 

 indoors or, preferably, in an outhouse, at anyrate shelteied from cold ; 

 the bottles should be fietpiently supplied with sufHcient water for the 

 ends of the stem to just reach it without being immersed in it, other- 

 wise they quickly go rotten ; under satisfactory conditions the shoots 

 will develop rootlets, and the buds will start growing sufficiently to 

 satisfy the most forward larva;, as the " nibbling " condition seems 

 to be that in which the larv* remain during the greater part of the 

 winter. This treatment is that with which I have been most successful 

 — sleeving in the open, leaving them exposed in the open, supplying 

 with fresh food throughout the winter in confinement, placing them 

 in fresh empty cages, Sec, have not proved so successful as those 

 treated in the manner above described — the larvfe are larger, more 

 get through the hybernating period successfully, and so on. Re- 

 turning to the Raindean x Chingford brood, 1 observed that, on 

 April 4th, 1«99, they had started feeding again in earnest, so 

 they were reinoved to clean cages, with plenty of freshly-cut privet. 

 Some of the larva; fed up much more quickly than others, became 

 much larger, and ultimately produced female moths, the smaller 

 larvtE becoming fuUfed at the same time, and producing males. By 

 the commencement of May they had begun to spin their puparia, and, 

 by the end of May, imagines began to appear, and continued to do so 

 until the middle of June. From this brood I ultimatLdy obtained 89 

 insects, r/:., 81 plain orange S s, 22 plain yellow ? s, 28 banded <? s, 

 18 banded $ s. 



From these I obtained the following pairings — (1) Plain orange df 

 y. plain yellow 5 (200 ova). (2) Plain orange S < banded ? 

 (loOova). (3) Banded J x plain yellow 2 (1 BO ova). (4) Banded 

 S X banded 5 (120 ova). The ova all hatched in just under two 

 weeks, and each brood was divided between two cages. The eight 

 cages were kept indoors, and the larva- fed up well to hybernation. 

 Unfortunately, at this time, I had no convenience for keeping so many 

 cages thiough the winter, and so I gave away four cages — one half of 

 the larva' — ^whilst the other moieties of the four broods, numbering 

 some 800 larvte, had to be mixed up into two cages, so that after all 

 my trouble in selecting the parents, and success in obtaining larvae 

 from the selected broods, I had, at the end of the autumn, only a 

 mixture of the four broods, unseparated and useless for heredity 

 experimental purposes. I was much surprised to find about the 

 middle of September that a small banded 5 had emerged in one of 

 the breeding-cages from the summer larva'. In April, 1900, those 

 larva? that i had retained recommenced feeding, and between the end 

 of May and middle of June 1 obtained a good number of imagines, 

 and, selecting similar g s and J s, obtained four crossings between 

 parents very similar to those obtained in 1899, and had about the 



