286 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [June, ’08 
Some Observations at Southern Pines, N. Carolina. 
By Apram HERBERT MANEg, A. M. 
Strategus antaeus. 
In these sand hills, where the long-leaf pines denude the 
ground of all but their own litter; in these black-jack barrens, 
where the many spaces bare among the tufts of wiry grass 
gleam white in vivid harmony with black and yellow; here, 
where neither stones nor gravel hinder plunge of trowel, there 
is free field for study, and in the World of the Little the toilers 
in the soil incite to special interest. 
My first antaeus, picked up in winter, were charred by 
ground fires. In summer, ’05, came my first polished males. 
On the night of July 11, ’06, I took my first females by elec- 
tric light. That same month we investigated an inch hole by 
a cart path and dug out a working male. July 26 I took my 
first pair from between two exposed roots of a large oak. They 
were pulverizing the surface soil, preparatory to shaft dig- 
ging. After several such takings of pairs and singles, I came 
to know the peculiar mound of earth always pulverized to a 
depth of one to three inches. August 3d I dug beneath an old 
mound and found an egg. August 9th and 14th several more 
eggs, and I note as follows: tty 
Beneath the mound of loosened soil an inch shaft extends 
vertically for six or eight inches. At bottom of shaft a one- 
and-a-quarter inch chamber reaches horizontally from one to 
five inches, and in this chamber, packed with finely broken 
bits of decadent oak leaves, a solitary egg is deposited. Some- 
times two or rarely three such chambers diverge from the 
same shaft, but I believe with never more than one egg in 
each. A favorite haunt for nesting is by a pile of dead oak 
leaves wind blown in some hollow, from which I conclude 
that the young larva feeds on leaf debris and later on decadent 
oak roots. 
The newly laid egg is oblong and white, in length fully three- 
thirty-seconds of an inch. In three or four days the egg 
swells to globular and is fully one-eighth inch in diameter. 
