RILEY^LARVAL HABITS OF BLISTER-BEETLES. 545 



-5), believed that it was a plant feeder in the immature state. 

 Olivier describes what is possibly the second larva as a soft, yel- 

 lowish-white, 13 -jointed grub, with short, filiform antennae, and 

 short, corneous, thoracic legs — "living in earth" {Traite Elem. 

 etc., M. Girard, Col., p. 6i8) ; but his account is very loose, and 

 may apply to any number of other coleopterous larvae. Audou- 

 in, who studied the Cantharides intently, making them the 

 subject of his thesis in his medical examinatioa, was obliged to 

 confess that absolutely nothing was known of their larv^al his- 

 tory ; and Mr. William Saunders, of London, Ont., in a paper 

 on the same subject read at the 1876 meeting of the American 

 Pharmaceutical Society, could add nothing more definite. 



This is about all we learn from the older writers, and the 

 opinion was general among them that, like their parents, the 

 blister-beetle larvas in question were vegetable feeders. In 1874 

 Laboulbene mentioned the fact (Ann. Soc. Ent. de France^ 

 1874, Ixxxiii.) that some one (name not given) had seen the 

 European Cantharis vesicatoria issuing from ground in the 

 neighborhood of which there werp wasps (guepes — no spe- 

 cific reference given), and rashly concludes that the former were 

 parasitic on these. Still more recently, M. J. Lichtenstein, of 

 Montpellier, France, has endeavored to discover the larval habits 

 of this species, and in 1875 he succeeded, after many fruitless 

 attempts, in causing the first larva to feed on honey kept in a glass 

 tube, and to undergo one molting. While spending a few days 

 with him, I had the pleasure of making a sketch of this second lar- 

 va as it swam on the honey. It subsequently died. He afterwards 

 reared two others in the same way until they had passed through 

 three molts, and is of the opinion that Cantharis develops in the 

 nests of Halictus. These facts, as well as analogy, pointed to 

 a parasitic life and partly carnivorous, partly mellivorous diet 

 for our own allied species, since the life-history of two genera 

 in the Family, viz. Meloe Linn, and Sitaris Latr. has been fully 

 traced. Indeed the young of all vesicants belonging to the Meloi- 

 dce^ so far as anything has yet been known of them, develop in 

 the cells of honey- making bees, first devouring the G^'g of the bee 

 and then appropriating the honey and bee-bread stored up by the 

 same. They all are remarkable, in individual development, for 

 passing through seven distinct stages, viz. the ^%%^ the first larva 

 iii — 36 [Nov. s, 1877.] 



