THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



ON THE OCCUERENCE OF COLIAS ED USA AND C. BY ALE 

 IN 1900, AND THE RESULTS OF REARING THE VAR. 

 HELICE FROM HELICE OVA. 



By F. W. Frohawk, M.B.O.U., F.E.S. 



The first news I heard of respecting these butterflies during 

 the past season was that on June 10th last, when my friend 

 Mr. W. A. Cope forwarded me, for inspection, a living G. hyale 

 male, which he had just captured near Cudham, Kent. A few 

 days after this capture I heard of others having been seen in the 

 south-eastern counties, principally Kent. I then predicted in 

 the ' Field ' that C. hyale would prove plentiful during the 

 following August and September. 



Excepting seeing one C. edusa on July 11th, in North Corn- 

 wall, I heard nothing more of either species until Aug. 15th, 

 when I learnt that C. hyale was common in different parts of 

 Kent, and that C. edusa was swarming in South Devon. 



On Aug. 18th three friends and myself journeyed down to 

 Sheerness, where we found C. hyale fairly plentiful, capturing 

 over sixty specimens and about two dozen C. edusa, including 

 one helice ; the twenty hyale which I took consisted of eighteen 

 males and two females. One female, being quite freshly emerged, 

 I killed ; the other, rather worn, I kept alive for ova, which, 

 on the following day, deposited about forty, and continued 

 depositing for one week, during which time I placed her upon 

 five separate plants of clover. The number of eggs deposited 

 upon the plants were 40, 80, 60, 42, and 14 — total 236, which 

 is about the full complement for this species. The eggs com- 

 menced hatching on Aug. 29th, and the larvse are now (Nov. 

 17th) eighty days old, and hybernating. Some of them occa- 

 sionally feed a very little, the majority remaining perfectly 

 motionless (in this respect they precisely agree in habit to the 

 hyale larvae that I had under observation in the autumn of 1892, 

 when I published notes on the earlier stages in the ' Entomo- 

 logist,' then stating that C. hyale hybernated in the larval state). 

 Although these larvae were subjected to much heat and sunshine 

 during September, they grew but slowly, while all the helice and 

 edusa larvae, which were kept under exactly similar conditions, 

 fed up and pupated during the month. The hyale remained 

 quite small, having only moulted twice by the time the helice 

 and edusa were in pupae. Another female C. hyale, captured by 

 my wife at Addington, Surrey, on Sept. 7th (where we subse- 

 quently took others, as well as C. edusa) deposited 140 ova, the 

 greater part of them being deposited on the 12th. We also cap- 

 tured about forty C. hyale near Broadstairs, Kent, between the 

 18th and 25th September, and also found C. edusa common, but 



