THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 165 
of September to the end of April, waiting for the Anthophore 
to emerge from their hybernacula. When more than one of 
these larve occupy the same cell of the Colletes, they fight 
with great ferocity until one alone remains, the others being 
killed and thrown into the honey; although it not unfre- 
quently happens that even the victor in this strife, finding the 
egg partially consumed by one of his former adversaries, and 
consequently insufficient for his maintenance, shares the 
fate of the vanquished ; but no such pugnacious dispositions 
are evinced at other times when consorting together in 
multitudes. Such contests are avoided in the cells of Antho- 
phora, where a single Sitaris-larva obtains possession of the 
egg unmolested at the moment of oviposition on the honey 
itself; a circumstance upon which M. Fabre comments as a 
wonderful display of instinct on the part of these larve 
(l.¢., p. 326). The secondary larva of Sitaris Colletes, which 
plunges into the honey, continues to feed thereon until April 
or May of the following year. It is destitute of eyes or ocelli, 
but still retains the vestiges of legs, and is furnished with 
spoon-shaped mandibles, acting alternately in the feeding- 
process. Eight or ten days after ceasing to feed, the adult 
larva assumes the pseudo-chrysalis stage of corneous con- 
sistency, within the detached, but still closely-enveloping, 
larval pellicle, which Fabre aptly compares to a bag of fine 
gauze. M. Valéry Mayet designates this stage as the 
“mseudo-nymphe,’—an appellation which he incorrectly 
attributes to Newport; for the latter, in his several memoirs 
on the transformations of Meloé (Linn. Trans., vols. xx., xxi.), 
always speaks of the “adult or pseudo-larva,” referred to in 
his last memoir as the only intermediate stage in which he 
had found this insect (/.c., p. 177),—for which stage M. Fabre 
has substituted the more appropriate denomination of “ pseudo- 
chrysalide” (p. 356), as not giving birth at once to the imago 
form, but evolving, within the indurated tegument, a semi- 
active Jarval form, followed by an ecdysis of the latter 
preparatory to assuming the condition of a true pupa or 
nymph (p. 338). Neither he nor Newport ever allude to a 
pseudo-pupa or pseudo-nymph, applicable rather to the 
_ aforesaid semi-active stage, which Fabre was the first to 
notice, and which, from its close resemblance to the 
antecedent larva, he designates as “la (rvisiéme larve.” 
