188 [■^"'i«' 



XIX, 2nd Series, pp. 267-9. A few further notes may be of interest. 

 Mr. Mills was in error in describing the ova as apple-green in colour ; 

 when laid they are creamy white, changing in the course of a few days 

 through lemon-yellow to pale brown, in which state they pass the 

 winter. The larvae do not hatcii in nature before the end of March, 

 they are full fed at the end of May or in early June, when they spin 

 their cocoon and remain in the larval stage for a period of from six to 

 eight weeks. Since Mr. Mills wrote in 1908 a small batch of ova has been 

 foimd on a fallen poplar, seven wild larvae were taken in 1913 in the 

 course of a two months' search, and a solitary pupa dug in August, 1914. 

 The larvae probably wander a long way before spinning up. The food- 

 plant in the Thames Valley is the male hybrid, Popidus serotina. A 

 note by Mr. Jones in the " Entomologist," Febi'uary, 1915, suggests 

 wych elm as another food-plant, and we can certainly accept it as such, 

 as at the time of the publication of his note I had a small batch of 

 larvae feeding well on common elm. Claims have been made for sallow 

 and aspen, which are not at present substantiated. Larvae in the 

 breeding cages of a friend have at various times eaten apple, plum, red 

 currant, and raspberry, but there is as yet no evidence that wild larvae 

 feed here on anything but poplar (and elm?). Treitschke gives an 

 interesting account of the gathering of wild larvae on Artemisia cam- 

 pestris and other low plants at Darmstadt ; about six per cent, of the 

 larvae produced gilvarjo, i.e., ab. intermedia, which is very much the 

 proportion we should expect to get here if the larvae are ever found 

 in numbers. 



Attempts at getting fertile pairings of bred insects have so far 

 met with no success. The following results from wild ova iiiay offer 

 some points of interest. Ova from ocethiris Bkh., with one exception 

 have always bred true to the typical group : that is, there would be 

 many ocellaris, one or two ab. Uneago (not always that), and a few 

 intermediate forms. The exception occurred in 1914, when a batch of 

 ova produced 21 imagines, 5 ocellaris Bkh. and 3 ab. intermedia ; the 

 rest were so crippled that they offered no indication as to which group 

 they belonged. These ab. intermedia differed from the usual heavily 

 banded bred form in having all the markings lighter than in wild 

 examples. A small batch from a type $ were forced in the late autumn 

 of 1913, the larvae hatched in December, and 12 imagines turned out in 

 May, 1914. Nine were ab. Uneago G-n., and the other three agreed better 

 with Borkhausen's description than any other British examples known 

 to me. These, and these only, have the transverse lines very pale and 



