136 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [Sess. 



Note on Insect Visitors to Corallorhiza innata 



AND SOME OTHER OrCHIDS IN THE FoRTH DISTRICT. 



By William Evans, F.R.S.E. 



(Read 12th April 1917.) 



In Knuth's Handbook of Flower Pollination (Engl, 

 ed. iii, p. 347, 1909) no " visitor " is given in the case of 

 Corallorhiza innata, R. Br. ; but, from the small size of the 

 flowers, it is concluded " that they are visited by small 

 insects, which use the anterior downwardly bent part of 

 the labellum as an alighting-platform, and creep thence to 

 the nectar secreted and concealed at the steeply down- 

 wardly bent base of the organ." As proof of the correct- 

 ness of the first part of this conclusion, the following 

 incident seems worth putting on record. 



On June 5, 1908, I found a group of half a dozen spikes 

 of the coral-root orchid (Gorallorhiza innata) in a stretch 

 of rather boggy ground beside Loch Leven, Kinross-shire. 

 The flowers were at their best, and had proved attractive 

 to a species of small black fly, numbers of which were 

 settled on each of the spikes. When disturbed they were 

 in no haste to leave the flowers (perhaps the nectar had 

 made them drowsy), creeping away among the grass rather 

 than attempting to escape by flight, so that their capture 

 was an easy matter. A score might have been secured 

 without any difficulty ; but, as it was, two for identifica- 

 tion were all that I took. An attempt, with Mr. P. H. 

 Grimshaw's help, to identify them at the Royal Scottish 

 Museum having failed, I submitted the specimens to Mr. 

 Austen, of the British Museum, who found them to agree 

 with an E'inpis from Nairn which he had labelled ? sp. 

 nov. Here the matter rested till hist year, when Mr. J. E. 

 Collin saw my two specimens and identified them as a 

 species standing in the late Mr. Verrall's collection under 

 the MS. name of Empis Hnowdoniana. Though no de- 

 scription of it has, so far as I am aware, yet been published, 

 tlie species, with Verrall's MS. name for it, has been recorded 

 fiom Sutherland l>y Colonel Yerbury in the Scottish 

 Naturalist for December IDTi. 



