LOCAL DISTRIBUTION OF INSECTS. 517 
our most splendid weevils (Rhynchites Bacchus). Dead 
fences are almost as fertile in insects as living ones. In 
gates, posts, rails, and other timber when felled, the 
timber-devouring tribes take their station : — between the 
bark and the wood are the Bostrichida?'; in the wood 
itself, the Anobidcc and the Capricorn beetles. Here 
also you may meet with many Hymenoptera, which 
either devour timber or nidificate in it, — as the Siricida?, 
Chelostoma, Trypoxylon, Sapyga, and several Dipt era. 
In the decaying hedgestakes and sticks, where the 
Spharia decorticans has turned off the bark, you may 
meet with Anthribus brevirostris ,■ with A. latirostris, and 
other beetles, in S. fraxinea .• and A. albinus, which I 
have more than once captured as it was emerging from 
the fissure of a gate-post, probably feeds on some in- 
ternal fungus. The grassy balks that separate open 
fields usually abound in umbelliferous plants, which are 
attended by numerous Hymenoptera and Diptera, par- 
ticularly by the various species of the splendid tribe of 
C/nysidce : and the grassy banks of fences, where the 
aspect is sunny, are generally bored by a variety of in- 
sects of the former Order, to prepare a nest for their 
young. Andrenida and Nomadidce particularly select 
this situation, the latter probably depositing their eggs 
in the burrows of the former a . By watching these places 
in the spring, you may perhaps have the good fortune 
to meet with a Stylops. It is singular, that some insects 
choose, for their own residence or that of their young, 
the hardest and most trodden pathways. Thus, some 
ants will build their subterranean apartments under 
» These, as well as Melecta, are probably a kind of Cuckow-bee. 
Mon. Ap. Angl. i. 150. 
