313 



fortune to capture a Stylops flying ; and on the Tuesday following 

 saw at least twenty flying about in a garden at Kingsdown, near Bris- 

 tol, but so high from the ground that I could capture only about half 

 a dozen. Since that time they have become gradually more scarce, 

 and to-day (May 12th) T have not been able to see one. The little 

 animals are exceedingly graceful in their flight, taking long sweeps, 

 as if carried along by a gentle breeze, and occasionally (which, how- 

 ever, I have only observed in the first I caught) hovering at a few 

 inches distant from the ground.* When captured they are exceed- 

 ingly active, running up and down the sides of the bottle in which 

 they are confined, moving their wings and antennae very rapidly. 

 Their term of life seems to be very short, none of those I have cap- 

 tured living above five hours ; and one I extracted from a bee in the 

 afternoon, was dead the next morning. All the stylopized bees, both 

 ^ and $ , I have taken, have manifested it by having underneath the 

 fourth (invariably) upper segment of the abdomen a protuberance, 

 which is scale-like when the Sty lops is in the larva state, but which is 

 much larger and more rounded when the Stylops is ready to emerge. 

 A bee gives nourishment generally to but one Stylops ; but I have 

 occasionally found two, and once three ! larvaj in one bee. — G. H. 

 K. TJiwaites, in ' Transactions of the Entomological Society of Lon- 

 don^ iii. 67. 



187. Singular cause of Vegetation in the desert. Thinking it might 

 be interesting to the readers of ' The Entomologist,' I have copied the 

 following sentence from the Rev. A. Bonar and R. M. M'Cheyne's 

 * NaiTative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews from the Church of 

 Scotland in 1839,' p. 109. " We noticed here (at Catieh, the ancient 

 Casiura) that most of the green patches in the sand (of the desert) are 

 the production of the beetle's industry. The beetle, with amazing la- 

 bour, drags the camel's dung into its hole in the sand, and thus a fruit- 

 ful soil is formed ready to receive the seeds of plants. To this small 

 insect probably we owe the greater part of the verdure of the wilder- 

 ness." — Adam White ; British Museum, May 30, 1842. 



188. Enquiry respecting the Cabbage-butterfly. Two distinct ca- 

 terpillars abound on the Brassica oleracea in this part of the country : 

 one of them is of a green colour (nearly that of the plant) ; the other 

 is of gayer hues, brown, striped with yellow, black, &c. Of the lat- 

 ter I collected a few, and they have recently come out in the butterfly 



* Their expanse of wing and mode of flight give them a very different appearance 

 to any other insect on the wing. 



