294 REPORT UNITED STATES ENTOMOLOGICAL COMMISSION. 



ruon in the United States and quite injurious to vegetation, swarming at times on po- 

 tato-vines, beans, clematis, and other plants. Their great numbers and destructive 

 habits make it all the more remarkable that so little has hitherto been discovered of 

 their early life. Harris, who evidently had hatched the first larva of the Ash-gray 

 blister-beetle {Macrobasis unicolor Kirby), says : " The larvae are slender, somewhat 

 flattened grubs, of a yellowish color, banded. with black, with a small reddish head 

 and six legs. These grubs are very active in their motions, and appear to live upon 

 fine roots in the ground ; but I have not been able to keep them till they arrived at 

 maturity, and therefore know nothing further of their history." ('' Insects injurious to 

 Vegetation", p. 138.) Latreille, according to Westwood, states that the larv£B live be- 

 neath the ground, feeding on the roots of vegetables (Introduction, vol. i, p. 301), but 

 the statement is evidently founded on conjecture. Ratzeburg, who well describes the 

 method of oviposition of the European Cantliaris vesicatoria, and roughly figures the 

 first larva (Forst Insecten, II, Col. Taf. ii, fig. 27 B), believed that it was a plant-feeder 

 in the immature state. Olivier describes what is possibly the second larva, as a soft, 

 yellowish-white, 13-jointed grub, with short, filiform antennae, and short, corneous, 

 thoracic legs — "living in earth" {Traite JSlem., etc., M. Girard, Col., p. 618); but his 

 account is very loose, and may apply to any number of other coleopterous larvee. Au- 

 douin, who studied the Cantharides intently, making them the subject of his thesis in 

 his medical examination, was obliged to confess that absolutely nothing was known of 

 their larval history. This is about all we learn from the older writers, and the opinion 

 w^as general among them that, like their parents, the blister-beetle larvae in question 

 were vegetable feeders ; and Mr. William Saunders, of London, Out., in a paper on the 

 same subject, read at the 1676 meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Society, could 

 add nothing more definite. 



In 1874, Laboulbene mentioned the fact (Ann, Soc. Ent. de France, 1874,lsxxiii), that 

 some one (name not given) had seen the European Cantharis vesicatoria issuing from 

 ground in the neighborhood of which there were wasps {guepes — no specific reference 

 given), and rashly concludes that the former were parasitic on these. Still more re- 

 cently, M. J. Lichtenstein, of Montpellier, France, has endeavored to discover the lar- 

 val habits of this species. He has succeeded, by furnishing, the larvae of C. vesicatoria 

 with artificial nourishment composed of the filled stomachs of honey-making bees, and 

 especially of Ceratina, in tracing the development from the triungulin to the coarctate 

 larva, which last differs from those of the other species considered by me, in freeing 

 itself entirely from the second larva skin. He has thus established the fact that Can- 

 tliaris agrees with the other species of the family in its hyper-metamorphosis ; but its 

 natural habits remain as much as ever a mystery, though the indications are that it 

 develops in the nests of some bee. These facts, as well as analogy, pointed to a para- 

 sitic life and partly carnivorous, partly meliivorous 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 Melo'idw, so ^ar 

 as anything has yet been known of them, develop in the cells of honey-making bees, 

 first devouring the egg of the bee, and then appropriating the honej^ and bee-bread 

 stored up by the same. They all are lemarkable, in individual dcA^elopment, for pass- 

 ing through seven distinct stages, viz, the egg, the first larva or tritingulin, the sec- 

 ond larva, the coarctate larva or pseudopupa, the third larva, the true i)upa, and the 

 imago. 



History of Meloe. 



The history of Meloe may be briefly summed up as follows : — The newly hatched or 

 first larva (now generally called triungulin) was first mentioned in 1700 by the Holland 

 entomologist Gcedart, who hatched it from the egg. Frisch and R6aumur both mis- 

 took it for a louse peculiar to bees and flies. DeGeer, who also obtained it from the 

 egg, mentions it in 1775 as a parasite of Bymenoptera. Linnaeus called what is evidently 

 the same thing, Pediculus apis ; K'rby iu 1802 described it as Pediculus meUttce, and 

 Dufour in 1828 named it Triungulinus andrenetarum. Newport in 1845 (Trans. Linn. Soc, 



