POPLAR BORERS. 437 



dence, with the unsightly swelliags around the trunk. The upper 

 branches of large trees are also occasionally girdled. From a gall 

 collected at Providence a beetle issued May 31. There may be sev- 

 eral mines in the same knot or gall. 



The beetle.— Uniformly gray, approaching the color of the downy under side of the 

 poplar, with no spots, while the antennae are black, stained with gray at the joints. 

 Length, lO'"™. 



4. The broad-necked prionus. 



Prionus laticollis Drury. 



Order Coleoptera; family Cekambycid^. 



Boring in the wood of the trunks and roots of different poplars, a white soft grub as 

 thick as one's thumb, producing an oval moderately convex black long-horned beetle 

 0.90 to 1.50 long and less than half as broad, its wing-covers rough from confluent 

 irregular punctures and with two or three raised lines, its thorax with three irregular 

 teeth along each side, and its antennae of twelve joints resembling little conical cups 

 placed one within the other and projecting upon their lower side like the teeth of a 

 saw; appearing abroad in July. (Fitch.) 



Though of late years injurious to the apple, grape-vine, and pine, this 

 beetle may originally have been confined to the poplars, especially as 

 Harris does not enumerate the above-mentioned trees, but says that it 



Fig. 162.— Broad-necked Prionus and pnpa. — After Riley. 



lives in the trunks and roots of the balm of Gilead, Lombardy poplar, 

 " and probably in those of other kinds of poplar also. The beetles may 

 frequently be seen upon, or flying around, the trunks of these trees in 

 the month of July, even in the daytime, though the other kinds of 

 Prionus generally fly only by night." Prof. S. J. Smith, in his report 

 as Entomologist to the State Board of Agriculture of Connecticut, 

 for 1872, remarks ; 



I have noticed it in logs of poplar, bass-wood, and oak, and in the trunks of old, 

 decaying apple trees, and Professor Verrill has collected it in great numbers, at New 

 Haven, in chestnut railroad ties (p. 346). 



