21 PSYCHE [February 



The scale i.s unusually dark and strongly chitinized. There is a punctured hand running 

 anteriorly from the anal plates in the middle line. 



Antennae 8-jointed. Below I give measurements of the antennae of the present insect, 

 and also of 6- and 7-jointed E. prunastri, from slides prepared by Mr. Pergande. 



Joints: (i.) (2.) (3.) (4.) (5.) "(6.) (^7.) (S.) 



? 33- 4-- -M- 36. 21. iS. 33. 



? 45. 45. 60. 17. -I. 34. — 



? 30- 90- 17- 21. 34. — — 



BUTTON-BUSH INSECTS. 



BY JAMES G. NEEDHAM, LAKE FOREST, ILL. 



Entomologists who collect from flowers know how many insects gather about 

 the heads of the button-bush — the "honeyballs" of popular nomenclature. These 

 heads are conspicuously -white, their fragrance is very marked, their nectar is 

 abundant, often filling the corollas so full that short-tongued insects may sip from 

 them, and the protandrous stamens heap their pollen upon the style knob, which 

 then protrudes convenientiy for the benefit of pollen feeders. By carefully watch- 

 ing these flowers through their season, one may obtain nearly all the flower-visiting 

 insects of his neighborhood. 



My own too brief season of butterfly collecting was spent at Piasa Bluffs on 

 the Mississippi, where there were a few button-bush clumps along the river banks 

 under the edge of the bluffs ; and there the butterflies swarmed — all the butterflies 

 of that vicinity. They made a picture there which I shall always remember with 

 delight. Dozens of them in a bright hued throng, poising on the swaying heads, 

 or hovering over the dark green clumps that were set at the outer edge of a thin 

 fringe of vegetation that stretched between the gray cliffs above the shining river 

 below. 



The predominant visitors are butterflies, but this predominance is unduly 

 apparent because these are so conspicuous. Robertson (Bot. gaz., vol. 16, 65-66) 

 lists 60 species of insects as visitors to the button-bush flowers. Of these 26 are 

 butterflies and 20 are bees. 



I spent the summer of 1899 in Lake Forest; and there, under favorable condi- 

 tions, began a study of the insects affecting the button-bush — not the transient 

 visitors of the flowering season, but the resident insects that enter more closely into 

 ecological relations with it. I found some 30 species of these, and made some 

 observations on the habits of many of them. I planned to continue my observa- 



