COLEOPTERA AT SHIERE. 221 



strong and rapid flyers, and may frequently be seen careering at 

 a headlong pace miles from any place where their food was likely 

 to occur ; and indeed they have often flown on board ship when 

 we have been a great distance from land. Although so strong on 

 the wing, they are bold and fearless in their habits, and when 

 struck at and missed often return and fly backwards and forwards 

 until captured ; and I have even taken them between my finger 

 and thumb as they sat on a leaf. 



The nettles they live on near Lyttelton, as before mentioned, 

 are tall bushy shrubs with tough woody stems, and leaves with 

 highly developed urticating powers, being furnished with strong 

 stinging spines arranged upon their upper surface along the ribs ; 

 and the stems also are thickly armed with the same, so that it 

 was painful work collecting the larvae, &c, with naked hands, for 

 upon this occasion I did not happen to have a pair of gloves 

 with me. 



(To be continued.) 



COLEOPTERA AT SHIERE. 

 By Edward Capron, M.D. 



A short account of some of the less common Coleoptera 

 taken in this neighbourhood during the present year, may 

 perhaps interest a few of your readers. On the whole beetles 

 have been anything but plentiful, and I never knew a season 



on the crown, deep greenish black, blotched and speckled with black and white dots, 

 and sparsely covered with short fine black hairs. Dorsal area hoary black, irrorated 

 with yellowish white dots ; subdorsal stripe somewhat interrupted, pale greenish 

 yellow, bordered below by a blackish stripe, which is thickly irrorated with minute 

 yellow dots ; spiracles black, in a greenish yellow ring, and bordered above by a 

 somewhat oblique yellow stripe and below by a wavy stripe of the same colour ; 

 ventral surface and claspers much wrinkled, pale green, tinged with yellow, with 

 indistinct yellowish white dots, and emitting a few fine light-coloured hairs ; ventral 

 claspers tipped with a reddish fringe ; short dorsal spines on 4th to 11th segments ; 

 a row of subdorsal spines, and a spine above and below each spiracle, those below 

 seated upon a pale peach-coloured blotch ; all the spines pale green, and finely 

 branched, the subdorsal row being the longest. These larvas vary slightly, some 

 having the yellow-green stripes more or less suffused with golden green ; others the 

 dorsal area greenish yellow, with reddish brown blotches; and some with the 

 spiracular region beautifully tinged with pink and pinkish yellow. I bred more than 

 130 splendid butterflies from the larvae and chrysalids taken near Lyttelton, and in 

 no case were any of them ichneumoned. 



