— 
co 
~—— 
[xix 
Wednesday, April 5th, 1905. 
Dr. F. A. Drxey exhibited the social web and pupal shells 
of Hucheira socialis, Westw., together with specimens of the 
perfect insect, and made the following observations :— 
** By the kindness of Professor Poulton I am able to show 
the common larval habitation of the remarkable gregarious 
Pierine Lucheira socialis, Westw. This is the actual nest, 
from Mexico, which was described and figured by Westwood 
in Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1836, p. 38, and Pl. VI, figs. 1 and 
2. The longitudinal incision is the one originally made by the 
late Hope Professor; the two transverse cuts have recently 
been added by myself, with the object of displaying the interior 
of the nest more clearly. The figure in our Transactions shows . 
the upper part of the receptacle, and the twig which descends 
through its neck, thickly covered with the pupz of the butter- 
fly suspended by their tails—a most unusual mode of attach- 
ment among the Pierine, though not entirely unexampled. 
At some time in the period of over seventy years during which 
this specimen has been preserved, the dried pupz have been 
attacked by some cabinet pest, as a result of which many have 
been detached from the wall of the nest, and several have 
crumbled away. Such of these loosened pupz and their 
fragments as could be collected are now cemented to a card 
and shown beside the nest, while among the pupee still in sttw 
will be seen the little bosses of silk in which the anal hooks of 
the detached pupz were once engaged. 
“Similar nests, presumably of this species, have been 
described by many travellers. Westwood (loc. cit.) quotes from 
Hardy’s ‘Travels in the Interior of Mexico’ one such account ; 
and another, by A. Sallé, will be found in the ‘ Annales de la 
Société Entomologique de France,’ 1857, p. 20. The latter 
observer, who discovered his nests on the branches of a small 
Arbutus, quotes from Humboldt, Essai politique sur le royaume 
de la Nouvelle-Espagne, Paris, 1827, p. 28, under the name of 
Capullos de madrogno, a description of nests which must, it 
seems, also have belonged to this species. Humboldt gives a 
short account of the larva, which, however, he considered to 
be a ‘ Bombyx.’ 
