NOTES ON THE GENUS EUPITHECIA. 221 



till the beginning of September, while some pupae — as is often 

 the case with venosata, pulchellata, hatvorthiata, expallidata, 

 togata, &c. — went over two winters. 



I half suspect that a further analogy to the alternate tree- 

 feeding and flower-feeding habit will be found to exist in another 

 double-brooded " pug," Eupithecia alhiimnctata. The freshly 

 emerged male found by Crewe on August 19th, and the parents 

 of eggs found by him a few days later (Ent. Ann. 1863, p. 127) 

 could not well have come from larvae that had fed upon the late- 

 flowering Angelica, and Barrett (Lep. Brit. ix. 79) quotes N. M. 

 Richardson as having found that they will feed freely on the 

 leaves of elder, to which an interesting confirmation has just 

 recently (1907) appeared in Dr. Nickerl's ' Spanner des 

 Konigreiches Bohmen,' where it is recorded (p. 34) that the 

 senior Nickerl bred a specimen on July 8th from a larva found 

 at Prague in June on elder. Like those of E. innotata and 

 virgaureata, however, the summer larvfe of albipunctata will also 

 accept flowers ; for D'Orville, according to Barrett, reared a fine 

 batch, from April eggs, on flowers on Anthriscus sylvestris — 

 "there being no other umbelliferous plant obtainable, in 

 blossom, at the time at which these eggs hatched." Some 

 were full grown in a fortnight, and the imagines appeared early 

 in July. 



Our other ^w^^eZica-feeding Eupithecia, E. trisignaria, is only 

 single-brooded, and therefore has no trouble in finding flowers 

 or seeds of its usual pabulum at the time when the larva needs 

 it, and I believe all the known food-plants are at least related to 

 Angelica. The list given in Hofmann's * Raupen ' is Angelica 

 si/lvestris, Heracleum sphondylium, Pastinaca saliva, Peucedanum 

 dreoselinum, and Laserpitium latifolium. Curiously, Barrett does 

 not mention the only plant upon which I have myself found it — 

 Pastinaca saliva, on a single head of which I took, at Horsley, 

 the only two larvae which yet stand to my account for this 

 species ! That there was nothing novel in the selection of this 

 food-plant, even for Britain, is clear from Mr. Sheldon's note in 

 the ' Entomologists' Record,' vol. i., p. 70. Dietze, however, 

 has a more remarkable observation (Stett. Ent. Zeit. xxxiii. 199). 

 He once found a great number of larvae on a completely decayed 

 plant of Angelica, and actually saw one of them seize an aphis, 

 lift it up after the manner of a Syrphus larva, and then suck 

 it dry. On account of the state of the plant, he was convinced 

 that these larvae must for a long time have supported themselves 

 entirely on aphides ; they were of a dark colour which he had 

 not otherwise seen, the dorsal area being entirely black, and he 

 thinks that this may be attributable to the abnormal diet, but I 

 would suggest that it was quite possibly adaptive to its sur- 

 roundings. One season when Eupithecia larvae were excep- 

 tionally abundant, Dietze found this species common everywhere. 



