THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 165 



of September to the end of April, waiting for the Anthophoraj 

 to emerge from their hybernacula. When more than one of 

 these larvae occupy the same cell of the Colletes, they fight 

 vviih (jreat ferocity until one alone remains, the others being 

 killed and thrown into the honey; although it not unfre- 

 quently happens that even the victor in this strife, finding the 

 egg partially consumed by one of his former adversaries, and 

 consequently insufficient for his maintenance, shares the 

 fate of the vanquished ; but no such pugnacious dispositions 

 are evinced at other times when consorting together in 

 multitudes. Such contests are avoided in the cells of Antho- 

 phora, where a single Sitaris-larva obtains possession of the 

 egg unmolested at the moment of oviposition on the honey 

 itself; a circumstance upon which M. Fabre comments as a 

 wonderful display of instinct on the part of these larvaj 

 (/. c, p. 326). The secondary larva of Silaris Colletes, which 

 plunges into the honey, continues to feed thereon until April 

 or May of the following year. It is destitute of eyes or ocelli, 

 but still retains the vestiges of legs, and is furnished with 

 spoon- shaped mandibles, acting alternately in the feeding- 

 process. Eight or ten days after ceasing to feed, the adult 

 larva assumes the pseudo-chrysalis stage of corneous con- 

 sistency, within the detached, but still closely-enveloping, 

 larval pellicle, which Fabre aptly compares to a bag of fine 

 gauze. M. Valery Mayet designates this stage as the 

 ''^pseudo-nyi/iphe,'" — an appellation which he incorrectly 

 attributes to Newport; for the latter, in his several memoirs 

 on the transformations of Meloe (Linn. Trans., vols, xx., xxi.), 

 always speaks of the " adult or pseudo-larva,''^ referred to in 

 his last memoir as the only intermediate stage in which he 

 had found this insect {I.e., p. 177), — for which stage M. Fabre 

 has substituted the more appropriate denomination oi '■^ pseudo- 

 chrysalide'''' (p. 356), as not giving birth at once to the imago 

 form, but evolving, within the indurated tegument, a semi- 

 active larval form, followed by an ecdysis of the latter 

 preparatory to assuming the condition of a true pupa or 

 nymph (p. 338). Neither he nor Newport ever allude to a 

 pseudo-pupa or pseudo-nijuiph, applicable rather to the 

 aforesaid serai-active stage, which Fabre was the first to 

 notice, and which, from its close resemblance to the 

 antecedent larva, he designates as " la Iruisienie lane.'" 



