22 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [Jan., 'c6 



triform in appearance. Not knowing their habits I placed a 

 quantity of trash in the glass jars and one of them commenced 

 gnawing at the small pieces of wood. Seeing this I supplied 

 a larger piece of dead limb, perhaps an inch in diameter, into 

 which my larva made its burrow, sealing it up, exactly as 

 described by Mr. Sherman. The moth came out the following 

 year. This then may be accepted as its normal habit. 



Now as to the third query ; and here I record one of the 

 greatest disappointments I ever experienced in the rearing of 

 larvae. 



In the same year while examining a group of Choke Cherry 

 (Ceraszs virginiana), second year's growth, I saw on the top of 

 a leaf what I first took to be a mass of bird droppings, but on 

 closer observation it turned out to be a shining, slimy-looking, 

 gray and white larva, about half an inch long coiled up at rest. 

 I put it in a glass jar with food plant and at first it fed only 

 at night. As it grew larger it fed freely during the day, and 

 at its final moult, changed to the most beautiful larva I have 

 seen. It was then about one and one-quarter inches long, of 

 a deep prussian blue, its skin smooth, like silk, marked on the 

 dorsum from the third to the ninth segment, with a series of 

 large oval cream yellow spots, placed crosswise like saddles, 

 one on each segment. From each end of these projected at an 

 angle of forty- five degrees, a narrow spatula-shaped ribbon 

 like appendage of the same cream yellow color. I had never 

 seen such a creature and I tended it carefully. One day I was 

 changing its food and while doing so the dinner bell rang and 

 I left it forgetting in my haste to place the glass cover on the 

 jar. When I returned from my meal, imagine my horror at 

 finding my jar uncovered with the window near it open and 

 my specimen gone. On the floor beneath my table on which 

 the jar stood, I had, some days before, placed two or three 

 pieces of old fence rail, and as I glanced about in my search 

 for it there was my larva calmly boring into one of them. I 

 did not disturb it but watched all afternoon as it cut out 

 rounded pellets and threw them aside, burying itself from 

 sight by night fall and by next morning it had sealed the open- 

 ing so neatly as to be hardly distinguished from the gray color 



