Woodworkers 



cereals or other seeds, or at least so damage them that 

 they are rendered unfit for consumption. But let us return 

 to the true insect carpenters. 



A relative of the goat-moth, one of our most beautiful 

 British insects, the wood-leopard moth is in its larvae' 

 stage an industrious carpenter. A handsome cream- 

 coloured moth, decorated with spots and splashes of steel- 

 blue, it is a common object of our country-side. The 

 female la,ys her eggs on or near the tips of the small 

 branches of some favoured tree the apple is commonly 

 selected and the caterpillars, when they emerge, bore 

 into the centres of the twigs and eat away the pith. They 

 are long-lived and eat the whole time, with the result that 

 the twigs they have favoured with their attentions wither 

 and die. Like its cousin the goat-moth, this insect makes 

 for itself a silk-lined armoured cocoon. 



The clearwing-moths, which mimic wasps and hornets, 

 have similar habits, but they display an amount of 

 ingenuity which is lacking in the wood-leopard moth. 

 Their larvae bore into the pith of certain trees, but when 

 they are fully fed, instead of building reinforced cocoons, 

 they work their way almost to the outside of the branch 

 in which they have lived, just before they change into 

 chrysalids. So nearly do they travel to the exterior that 

 but the thinnest tissue of wood separates them from the 

 air. Settling down with their heads towards the outside 

 of the tree, they change into chrysalids, which are armed 

 with backwardly directed spines. When the moths are 

 about to emerge, the chrysalids, by means of these spines, 

 push their way outwards, break the thin shell of wood, 

 and pass half-way out of the end of their burrow. When 

 the moths escape, the empty chrysalid cases project from 

 the tree. 



Concerning these larvae, an entomologist once wrote : 

 " We observed about a dozen of them during this summer, 

 in the trunk of a poplar, one side of which had been 

 stripped of its bark. It was this portion of the trunk 



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