4098 The Zoologist — August, 1874. 



I find nothing that calls for comment: it has evidently been 

 carefully prepared. 



Mr. Wheeler's contribution "On Breeding Lepidoptera in Con- 

 finement" contains little that is very new to entomologists, but 

 certainly a good deal that will be read with interest by beginners ; 

 and one passage that possesses considerable interest. 



" One constantly recurring cause of failure is the difficulty of getting the 

 sexes to pair; indeed after being bred, in an in, from the same stock, 

 sooner or later all moths refuse to pair. Some do so after the second, and 

 even after the first generation, and all are more or less afiFected by it. In 

 this case nothing remains but to mix the breed, either with those reared by 

 some friend from a different stock ; or still better by pairing with wild males. 

 If the species occurs in the neighbourhood this may often be readily done, 

 the modus operandi being simply to tie a piece of fine silk firmly round the 

 base of one of the fore wings [of the female], and having thus secured it to a 

 tree where the insect is supposed to fly, to leave it all night. If the night 

 be favorable, very often the male wuU be found with it in the morning ; so 

 that besides a batch of fertile eggs, you secure an additional specimen. 

 Sometimes, however, a bat or some such nocturnal marauder will find your 

 female, and make a meal of her instead ; but on the whole this is a very 

 profitable mode of pairing, as it wastes comparatively few specimens, and 

 the eggs are almost certain to be fertile. I may mention that I have myself 

 tried this plan successfully with Palpina and Ziczac, while Mr. Harwood 

 informs me that he regularly pairs by this process many of the prominents, 

 the kittens, &c." — Page 59. 



There is no better authority on such a subject than Mr. Harwood, 

 whose skill and success in rearing beautiful specimens of Lepi- 

 doptera is above all praise. 



Mr. Bridgman's paper on Prosopis, as Mr. Smith has chosen to 

 call it, Hylaeus as we old bee-hunting entomologists have known it 

 for years, is very interesting, but perhaps not quite conclusive: he 

 concludes thus : — 



" These bees form their nest in any suitable situation, whether in soft 

 wood or earth, not even despising ready-formed holes. At the bottom of 

 one of the cells in the bramble-sticks I found a hard, half-round pellet of 

 some yellow substance, which, under the microscope, turned out to be a 

 mass of regular oval-shaped pellets, closely and carefully packed together, 

 evidently of pollen and honey mixed, each pellet covered with the same 

 gold-beater 's-skiu-like secretion. Now as the bee has no special organs for 

 collecting pollen, I fancy it must have been collected and carried home in 



