PARADISE KEY SAFFORD. 395 



bees and wasps are helpless, footless grubs, while the young termite 

 when it emerges from the egg is an active, crawling, six-legged crea- 

 ture, which soon begins to feed itself.^ 



DRAGON FLIES AND DEMOISELLES. 



On plate 40 are shown five species of Odonata from Paradise Key, 

 identified for the writer by Miss Bertha P. Currie of the United 

 States National Museum, and her brother, Mr. Eolla P. Currie. 

 While sitting on the screened veranda of the park lodge it was 

 pleasant to watch these graceful insects, like squadrons of miniature 

 airplanes, waging incessant war upon the besieging mosquitoes. It is 

 not possible within the limits of this paper to speak of the early 

 aquatic stages of these insects and their transformations. Atten- 

 tion has been called in connection with the Bromeliacea3 to the fact 

 that in tropical America there are certain species which lay their 

 eggs and undergo their transformations from the larval stage to the 

 perfect insect in the water collected by the leaves of epiphytal plants 

 of that family. In this connection the reader is referred to the recent 

 work of the Calverts on the natural history of Costa Rica.^ Some 

 of the species shown in the illustration are quite widely distributed, 

 but Gynacantha nervosa^ the largest of the collection (pi. 40, fig. 2) 

 is a very rare tropical species hitherto represented among the North 

 American Odonata of the United States National Museum by a single 

 specimen; and the dainty little demoiselle, xirgiaUagma ininutum 

 (pi. 40, fig. 4), which is even rarer, is quite new to the collection. 



MARGARODES, OR GROUND PEARLS. 



In the black soil of the forest, often in the clefts of limestone pene- 

 trated by the roots of plants, quantities of little opalescent globules 

 are sometimes found. These beautiful little objects are the shells 

 of Coccidae or scale insects, known as Margarodes or ground pearls. 

 They occur also in the West Indies, on some of the islands of which 

 they are strung into necklaces and made into purses. Very little is 

 known concerning their life history. It was formerly thought that 

 they occur on the roots of plants, but Mr. W. T. Swingle, who was 

 the first to find them within the limits of the United States, in Jan- 

 uary, 1895, called attention to the fact that in no case did he find 

 them attached to roots. In the accompanying illustrations, plate 41 

 shows a colonj' found by C. A. Mosier on Paradise Key, in 



^ For a detailed account of these interesting insects the reader is referred to the paper 

 of Mr. Thomas E. Snyder, entitled " Biology of the termites of the eastern United 

 States," published by the U. S. Department of Agriculture as Bureau of Entomology 

 Bulletin No. 94, pt. 2, 1915. 



' Calvert, Amelia Smith, and Philip Powell, A Year in Costa Rican Natural History, 

 pp. 230-243. 1917. 



