^'°;;] Best, To the Alps for Coleopiera. 85 



TO THE ALPS FOR COLEOPTERA 



By D. Best. 



{Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, gih Aug., 1920.) 



In the middle of January last a fellow-member (Mr. J. E. 

 Dixon) and myself agreed on a visit to the Hospice on Mount 

 St. Bernard, the crossing-place of the road from Bright to 

 Omeo, and about 5,000 feet above sea-level, in the hope that 

 the locality would yield some rare specimens for our collections. 

 As no doubt some of you have visited the Hospice, I will 

 merely say that the building is old, and really wants replacing 

 by one more up'to-date. We, however, received very fair 

 treatment, and have nothing serious of which to complain. 

 All the same, it is not a place suitable for ladies. The pro- 

 prietor (Mr. Thompson) and his wife being away at the time, 

 there was some delay in receiving a reply to my letters asking 

 for particulars as to how we were to get there ; but a friend of 

 theirs in Bright wrote me that the proprietor's car would meet 

 us on arrival of the train and take us straight up. Thus it 

 happened that we reached the Hospice about 7 o'clock in the 

 evening, doing the whole journey from Melbourne (224 miles) 

 in about thirteen hours. It was very cold, and, in fact, during 

 our five days' stay vve did not experience one really hot day. 

 The nights were always more or less chilly, necessitating, on 

 one occasion, a big log fire and plenty of blankets on the beds. 

 One reason for our preferring the Alps to the Buffalos, where 

 there is good accommodation, was that the country has not 

 been nearly so much mutilated by " trippers," and, excluding 

 the destruction by fires, the place remains practically in its 

 natural state. The results of our collecting were not so good 

 as we expected — whether from the mild season or the result 

 of fires we cannot say. The flowers of the Snow Gums, 

 Eucalyptus pauciftora, had all disappeared, and the only shrubs 

 we saw in flower were a small patch of Leptospermum, sp., 

 and some Leptospermum scoparium (?) on the banks of the 

 Dargo River, near its source, just below the Hospice, on the 

 Gippsland side. From the former we took thret- specimens of a 

 Buprestid quite unknown to iis, and possibly new, and a couple 

 of a dark variety of Hesthesis cingulala, similar to specimens 

 I had taken on the Hursaria at Walsh's Creek, near the head 

 of the Yarra. The flowering of the Snow Gums being over, 

 we had no prospect of obtaining any of that fine beetle Tragocerus 

 lepidopierus, the only sign we saw of them being the wing-cases 

 of a female. This beetle must, I think, take a rather long 

 period to mature — probably at least three or four years — as 

 the larva works round the whole of the root of the Snow Gum 

 it enters, and the half of one which I am exhibiting this evening 



