THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 333 



ACTIAS LUNA. 



I have been raising several broods of Actias lima this year. jHe pre- 

 vailing type has very yellow-tinted males, a sort of golden-green, Sometimes 

 almost approaching sulphur-yellow, and some of them have tlfe dark lines 

 across the wings very pronounced and strongly undulated. /^ The females 

 are always clear green. I am trying to intensify these peculiarities by 

 selecting the most marked examples to breed from, and as a complete 

 generation requires only about seven to eight weeks during our long 

 summers, results should be quickly attainable. 



The species is easily raised in quantity, but is exceedingly rare out 

 of doors. This seems to be due chiefly to the. unremitting search for the 

 caterpillars by the large paper-wasps (Polistes). Nothing can exceed the 

 tiger-like ferocity with which these wasps leap upon and rip up and 

 devour one of these great caterpillars — sometimes they bite holes in my 

 cheese-cloth bags on the trees, and a veritable massacre of the innocents 

 follows the entry of one of these murderous creatures. I have seen them 

 tearing furiously with fore feet and jaws at the webs of the tent-caterpillars. 

 They seem to track their prey by scent rather than sight. 



A large Cecropia caterpillar put on a branch in the open escaped 

 them for a day or two — Cecropia is not a native here — but very soon I 

 came upon a wasp licking her chops over the last of it, while two 

 examples of a smaller species of Polistes were chewing at the offal like 

 jackals at a tiger's feast! The big wasp ignored them, but snapped 

 viciously at a fly that came for a taste. 



Last winter I sept to the Can. Ent. a modest little advertisement of 

 surplus Luna cocoons for sale. The outcome proves that this journal 

 furnishes to its advertisers, besides sordid lucre, pretty nearly "everything 

 that is requisite and necessary, as well for the body as for the soul," 

 for I sold all my cocoons, and have had a most interesting correspondence 

 and exchange of treasures. One boy in far-off Nova Scotia says I am to 

 be his adopted "Uncle Teddy" henceforward as long as I live, and that 

 he is comiilg some time to visit me in Florida ! 



No\y, no one can ask more in this world than to have plenty of love 

 and plejity of money (or its equivalent) and an agreeable avocation — the 

 three together are surely "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice" — and all 

 in retlirn for a paltry half-inch of advertising space, at a money-cost too 

 insignificant for consideration I — Theodore L. Mead, Oviedo, Fla. 



