172 



FAMILY BOSTRYCHIDAE 



considered a forest pest save in exceptional cases, when, owing to the 

 enormous abundance of the insect in an area, it would infest and kill off 

 sickly trees, as in the case of the sissu standards attacked by the Polyporus 

 fungus at Changa Manga. In such cases, although the beetle is not a 

 bast-feeder in the same way as some of the Scolytidae, the abundance of 

 the bostrvchids might result in so large a number of shot-holes being bored 

 through the bark into the sapwood as to further weaken and kill the tree. 



Another curious fact about the beetle is that it will attack the wood of 

 the tree anywhere, from the thick knotty wood of the roots, the wood of 

 the main stem, to that of the branches. 



To prove that the insect oviposits alike in fresh and in old wood, a fact 

 which has been demonstrated for years past in the Changa Manga Fuel 

 Depot, I took some freshly felled billets of sissu containing ovipositing 

 beetles in April, and bred from them in Dehra the May-June beetles. 

 These latter oviposited in the same billets, from which I obtained a genera- 

 tion of beetles in September. These oviposited in the sissu billets in which 

 their parents and grandparents had been reared, and I obtained some of 

 the beetles of the third generation in the third week of November, the 



billets being by then very 

 >' """'""""" ^-^ dry, and consisting of 



little more than powder. 

 This serves as a practical 

 proof of the heavy loss of 

 material which obtains in 

 a fuel depot when the 

 beetle is plentiful and the 

 material is kept in situ 

 for any length of time. 



It has been already 

 indicated that the beetle 

 is to be often found at- 

 tacking wood in company 

 with S. crassum. On the 

 whole, so far as present 

 observations go, I should think 5. anale is the commoner of the two 

 insects, but I make this statement subject to reconsideration after a further 

 study of the two pests. 



In addition to the sissu {Dalbevgia sissoo) and phulahi {Acacia nwdcsta) 

 which it badly infests at Changa Manga, the beetle, as we have seen, infests 

 Terminalia chebula, Xylia dolabriformis, and Dalbergia latifolia in the 

 Bombay Presidency, and Prosopis spicigeva in Sukkur, in Sind. This wood, 

 as mentioned under S. crassum, is exported to Quetta for fuel, and the 

 beetles have been taken in that station issuing from the fuel stacks. They 

 do not, however, appear to breed up at that elevation, for I did not find any 

 trace of their attacks in the trees. 



Fig. 117. — A, gallery of Sino.rylon amilc in Acacia 

 modcsta. a a, entrance-tunnels ; d, pairing-chamber ; 

 c, one egg-gallery just commenced. B, pupal chamber, 

 with immature beetle. Changa Manga. (E. P. S.) 



