REPORT OF THE SOCIETY 51 



hue. They often enter Hving rooms in the evening, and they have the faculty 

 of emitting a very disagreeable smell which often is sufftcient to betray 

 their presence even before the eye has caught sight of them. The larvae, 

 in undergoing their metamorphosis, spin a cocoon of closely woven silk 

 hidden in the chinks of the bark. 



These insects are commonly found some years, in June and July, in 

 meadows. Their flight is slow and toilsome. The larvae, as mentioned above, 

 are carnivorous and feed on plant lice, on larvae of Chermes and Curculios. 

 The perfect insect lives on nothing else than the juice of flowers and does 

 not injure them in any appreciable manner. The egg hatches seven days 

 after being laid and the larvae keeps alive for twelve days. As soon as it 

 has left the egg, it begins to prey on plant lice often twice as large as itself. 

 It may eat up thirty or forty of them in an hour. The larvae have a flat 

 wrinkled, hairy body and their head is provided with very powerful mandi- 

 bles. At the end of about twelve days, they use their spinneret, (contrary 

 to the caterpillars which have it at their anterior end they have it on the last 

 segment,) to spin an almost spherical cocoon, so constructed that the perfect 

 insect may enlarge from an aperture closed by a sort of cap. The larva 

 is so voracious that, at the period of its change to a chrysalis, it eats sixty 

 plant lice in sixty minutes. Hence, the common name of "Aphis-lion" 

 given to it. 



It remains enclosed in the cocoon for sixteen days, at the end of which 

 time it comes out a perfect insect which almost instantaneously becomes 

 twice as large as the cocoon in which it was enclosed. Its stretched wings 

 take on all the hues of the rainbow, its body assumes its green hue, and its 

 eyes their golden color as it takes its flight, leaving the cocoon empty but 

 saturated with the nasty smell which exhales, as said above, from this 

 beastie. Seven days in the egg, twelve days as larva, sixteen days spent 

 in the cocoon — -this gives a period of five weeks, constituting the cycle 

 of the existence of this insect before it becomes perfect. When one knows 

 that each female lays forty eggs per night, he has a good idea of the pro- 

 lificacy of this family of insects and understands how much it deserves 

 our consideration when we bear in mind the efficacious help it gives us in 

 the destruction of Aphides, Chermes and curculios. Let us pay it as much 

 respect as it deserves for its usefulness. 



