166 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
burrows had evidently long since been deserted by the original 
makers, but I saw protruding from four or five of them the 
heads of Strongyliwm tenuicolle. Upon investigation I found that 
the beetles had died in the vain effort to escape from the gallery, 
the entrance being much too small to let the body pass through. 
Now I know by experience that Strongyliuwm is not a true boring 
insect, and lives only in the very soft wood of decaying trees, 
especially of oak. It appears to me probable, therefore, that the 
parent Strongylium had laid eggs at the entrance of a gallery 
made by a species smaller than itself, and that this mistaken 
instinct resulted in the death of its progeny in the manner just 
described.” 
APANTELES FRATERNUS Rhd.—It may be interesting to the 
readers of this Magazine to know something of this new British 
species. I bred it on the 20th September, from Aspilates 
citraria. The cocoons are formed on the same plan as those 
of Microplitis alvearia (Entom. xiii. 244), and the larve protected 
them in the same manner. After the escape of the flies I 
removed a thin slice, with a sharp knife, from one side of the 
batch of cocoons, to enable me to see how the cocoons were 
placed; the bottom consisted of eight, and eight were resting on 
these; the others above were not in such regular order, from the 
circumstance that eight appeared to have been placed in the 
second tier instead of seven; the batch consisted of twenty-seven 
cocoons; those in the centre were more or less pentagonal, and 
in general appearance looked like a piece of miniature honey- 
comb; the nest of cocoons was 7 mm. in length and 23 in height. 
Microgaster flavipes forms a similar cocoon and infests Boarmia 
repandata. It would be interesting to record what others pupate 
in this manner.—G. C. Branetut; Stonehouse, Devon. 
[Of this species Dr. Reinhard says (Berl. Ent. Zeits. xxv. 47), 
‘the yellowish white cocoons, to the number of 100 or upwards, 
are spun together in the form of a honeycomb in a very neat 
manner, with the long base of the comb attached to a thin twig 
or stem. There are many specimens of these cocoons in the 
Vienna Zoological Museum, collected by Rogenhofer in the 
neighbourhood of Vienna, from which this species had emerged. 
The holes in the cocoons from which the imagos had emerged 
occurred partly on the upper side of the comb and partly on the 
under side. The host, in which this Apanteles larva was 
