﻿OF THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 31 



The eyes and eyelet are black, and the legs pale rufous in both 

 sexes ; while the wings are hyaline with prismatic colors. In escaping 

 from the cocoon, the fly makes a clean, somewhat spiral cut at one 

 end, always leaving a small hinge for its prison door to swing on. 



These flies, in confinement, soon die without ovipositing, which 

 indicates that they nourish on something out-doors. As with most 

 saw-flies, the perfect insects are quite irregular in coming out of the 

 ground, many of them issuing in May, but others not till toward 

 the end of Summer, On opening cocoons that had passed the Winter 

 I have found many yet containing the larva the latter part of June, 

 while others of the same brood had become flies six weeks before. 

 The species has generally been considered single-brooded'; but as I 

 have had the eggs laid as early as May, and the young worms feeding 

 the latter part of that month, two broods are not improbably pro- 

 duced. In ovipositing, the female saws beneath the epidermis on one 

 of the flat sides of the leaflet and pushes into the slit an egor^ which 

 is whitish, ovoid, 0,8 m.m, long on an average. As the egg swells it 

 forms a conspicuous bulging of the epidermis, and the mouth of the 

 slit opens and exposes more and more a portion of the egg. The young 

 worm has the black head and black-ringed thoracic legs of the full 

 grown individuals, but otherwise diifers essentially from them, the 

 body being uniformly pale and unspotted. The worms are more or 

 less gregarious throughout their existence, and seldom leave a twig 

 or branch till they have completely stripped it. Inconspicuous at first, 

 they are seldom noticed till the denuded branches attract attention, 

 and when, after the last molt, they strip a tree with astonishing rapid- 

 ity. They have a habit of throwing back the head and tail when dis- 

 turbed, and if violently shaken many of them will fall to the ground. 

 They also use the tail end of the body to grasp more firmly the leaf- 

 lets upon which they feed. This is the worm described by Fitch as 

 the possible larva of Loyhyrus LeContei^ and the real larva of this 

 last will be described further on. 



NATURAL ENEMIES. 



The reason that this Pine-worm abounds at times and then sud- 

 denly disappears, is that it is extensively preyed upon by a parasitic 

 Ichneumon fly, belonging to the genus Limneria. The species, which 

 I have also bred from some wax-feeding larva (probably Ephestia 

 zeoe) does not fully accord with any of the descriptions of Norton^ 

 Oresson, or Frovancher. I therefore briefly define it herewith : 



