September, 1S02. I 225 



THE LARVA OF BITULA WOODIANA FEEDS ON VISCUM ALBUM. 

 BY JOUN II. WOOD, M.B. 



Nothing in the present season has pleased me so much as the 

 discovery of the hirva of this interesting Tortrix. For years it had 

 beaten me. The apple trees had been searched and beaten for it in 

 vain ; the gravid moth had been imprisoned within doors in glass 

 vessels, and even sleeved on the living tree, and equally in vain, for 

 no eggs were ever obtained. But all things, as the proverb goes, 

 come to him who waits, and so one day in the middle of April the 

 larva came at last my way. I was looking at a mistletoe bush {Viscitm 

 album) in the head of a large apple tree lying on the ground, and 

 thinking more of bugs and Aphides than of Lepidopterous larvcT, 

 when I caught sight of a curious little crescentic mine in one of the 

 leaves, that I thought at first was Dipterous, till I opened it and found 

 within an unmistakeable Lepidopterous larva. On searching further 

 some half-dozen others were found, and all of precisely the same 

 pattern. That it was something good, perhaps very good, I felt sure, 

 and in a half joking spirit I labelled it there and then, Woodiana—^. 

 most happy guess, as the event proved. Under its inspiration ample 

 supplies were collected. It proved easy to rear, and in all between 

 thirty and forty moths were bred, nearly twice as many as had been 

 taken in all the previous years, and with much labour, by searching 

 the apple trunks in July. 



The mine is a narrow gallery of uniform width, with one or more 

 brown-margined openings for the discharge of frass ; it forms a yellow 

 halfmoon-shaped track on the under-side of the leaf, occasionally 

 sending off a diverticulum, and is lined, in part at least, with silk. 

 Such was the mine as I met with it in the middle of April, and such 

 probably would be its appearance any time in the course of the 

 winter. The larva it then held was very small with black head and 

 plates, and of a clear yellow colour, indicating, I think, that it had not 

 yet fairly woke up from hibernation, for within a week of being 

 carried indoors active consumption of food had begun, and the yellow 

 colour been exchanged for a delicate green one. With the grow^th of 

 the larva the mine loses its characteristic crescentic shape, and becomes 

 at first a narrow pouch, and ultimately a blotch, implicating the whole 

 leaf if small, or a part only and the end almost invariably if large. 

 In one part or other of the mine, and usually down the middle, is a 

 narrow silken band of cross fibres on either wall, by the contraction 

 of which the parts are wrinkled or arched into a sort of tube for the 

 larva to rest in when not engaged eating. 



