﻿THE REARING OF LARVAE. 147 



of hind wings whitish suffused with fuscous, powdered with brown 

 on the costal area, discoidal dot blackish. 



Expanse, 18 millim. 



Collection number, 1038. 



Two females from Kanshirei, April 19th, 1906, and April 9th, 

 1908. 



Seems to come nearest to K. hrunnea, Hampson. 

 (To be continued.) 



THE REAEING OF LARV^. 

 By C. Rippon, M.A., F.E.S. 



(Continued from p. 116.) 



Cages. 



For the successful rearing of larvae, especially when fairly 

 large batches are being dealt with, nothing is more important 

 than to provide accommodation suitable to their particular 

 habits. I should not like to say that it would be impossible to 

 construct a cage with such internal arrangements that it could 

 be adapted for larvae of every different sort of habit, but I have 

 never yet seen one ; besides, it would probably be such a costly 

 article as to be out of the reach of the ordinary entomologist. 

 If we consider for a moment the different habits of larvae, it is 

 easy to realize why they require different sorts of houses in con- 

 finement. Larvae which feed by day on bushes and trees want 

 plenty of light and cages which are high in proportion to their 

 length and breadth, while larvae which feed by night on low- 

 growing vegetation do best in a dark cage which is quite shallow 

 in proportion to its length and breadth. Then there are others 

 whose habits are best served by the use of tall dark cages, and 

 still others by shallow light cages. The sun-loving larvae, too, 

 want special provision, such as many of the Rhopalocera, several 

 of the "Bombyces," the Cucullia, &c. For these a cage must be 

 provided which, while admitting the sunlight freely, must not 

 get unduly hot in the interior. 



My attention was first drawn to the advantages of using 

 different types of cages some years ago. At the time I was 

 using, apart from sleeves, only one form for what I may call 

 ordinary larvae, which consisted of a fairly high superstructure 

 of glass and perforated zinc imposed on a sort of wooden box. 

 With this type of cage I bred many different species with con- 

 siderable success, but failed unaccountably with others that were 

 not supposed to be difficult ; amongst my failures were certain 

 low-feeding Noctuae, with which a friend of mine had no difficulty 

 at all, although he could not rear some tree-feeding Noctuae, 

 which I found most easv. I discovered that he used almost 



