NOTES, CAPTURES, ETC. lf)3 



he reserved to a future occasion. He then proceeded to describe 

 some experiments made on the sense of direction possessed by 

 ants, but it would not be easy to make these intelligible without • 

 figures. After detailing some further experiments on the power 

 of recognising friends, he gave some facts which appear to show 

 that ants b}^ selection of food can produce either a queen or 

 a worker at will from a given egg. Lastly, he stated that he had 

 still some ants which he had commenced to observe in 1874, and 

 which are still living and in perfect health ; they now, therefore, 

 must be more than seven years old, being, therefore, by far the 

 oldest insects on record. — Communicated by the Secretary. 



DoLERUs PALUSTRis BRED. — It is curious that until last year 

 the life-history of the Dolerldce was quite unknown, although we 

 have fifty-seven European species, many of which are amongst 

 our very commonest sunflies. In 1880 Vollenhoven's description 

 of the larva of D. hcp-jnatodes, Schk., was posthumously pub- 

 lished (Tijd. V. Ent. xxxiii., 14 — 16). This feeds on Juncus 

 effusus. Kaltenbach bred D. gonager, Fabr., from Festuca pra- 

 tensis, but gave no life-history notes nor description of larva 

 (' Pflanzenfeinde,' p. 746). For some years I have found a sawfly 

 larva feeding inside the stems of Equisetum, which I strongly 

 suspected to belong to a Dolerus ; but several, not very deter- 

 mined, attempts at rearing the imagos had failed. Last year I 

 collected some scores of the larvae, and kept them in three large 

 cages. The contents of that kept damp very soon became quite 

 rotten and useless ; in that kept dry the food-plant and larvae 

 very soon dried up ; but the cage in which the Equisetum was 

 slightly damped, through the addition of fresh stems from time 

 to time, it became very mould}^ ; here I had hopes, and from this 

 store am now breeding imagos of Dolerus palustris, Klg. A male 

 and female emerged yesterday, and two males the day before. 

 The larva is roughly described in my diary as follows : — Form as 

 in Vollenhoven's figure (Tijd. v. Ent., vol. xxxiii., pi. 3, bottom), 

 with six legs and sixteen claspers, including the anal pair ; head 

 dark brown, with pale oval mark on face ; body wrinkled, greenish 

 slate dorsally, glaucous ventrally ; dorsal line slightly darker than 

 general ground colour ; spiracular lines greenish yellow, in which 

 are the black inconspicuous spiracles ; length, three-quarters of 

 an inch. It feeds inside the stems of Equisetum limosum, not 

 eating through the nodes, but apparently coming out at the end, 



