LIFE-HISTORY OF BLISTER-BEETLES. 297 



dered irapervioiis to the moisture of tlielioiiey and bee-bread stored iu it for the young. 

 It is evident, therefore, that this chirasy Meloid will have diflicnlty ia crawling out of 

 or about the cells, and it is probably subterranean and seldom, if ever, leaves the bee- 

 gallery. It can climb and drag its body, but with some difficulty, up a steep surface, 

 and, as it does not leave the bee-cell till spring, when the Aiithojyhora tubes are very 

 generally broken and have fallen, it may possibly wander a short distance from the 

 mouth of the bee-burrow. The triungulin is yet unknowm, but the ultimate stage of 

 the second larva as well as of the coarctate larva, as shown by the distended and unrup- 

 tured skins, exhibits the ordinary family characteristics, the legs and mouth-parts 

 being atrophied iu the former, and merely tuberculous in the latter. The lateral ridge, 

 as found in Epicauta and Meloe, is not conspicuous, and in this respect, as well as in 

 the final transformations taking place within the two unrent skins, the insect ap- 

 proaches Sitaris. In the hairless and unarmed surface of the second larva, and of the 

 third larva and pupa, as shown by careful examination of their shrunken exuviai, the 

 insect also resembles that genus. 



[The male, which we have figured, is characterized by two series of subquadrate 

 semi-corneous, dorsal abdominal plates which are lacking in the female. The beetle 

 is fully formed in autumn, but remains within the distended larval exuviae until the 

 following spring, when it works out of them backwards. As warm weather approaches, 

 both sexes become quite active, with a strong tendency to burrow whenever they get a 

 chance. The abdomen of the male shrinks somewhat, while its surface hardens and 

 becomes firmer. During the early part of May we have had one female lay, loosely in 

 the ground, as many as 680 eggs. Over two weeks were occupied with the laying, and 

 the abdomen steadily shrank nntil it was not more than one-third as large as in our 

 figure of the male. The eggs are iiale honey-yellow, ovoid, l.l"^'" long, and rather 

 more than one-third as wide in the midtlle. The triungulin has not hatched at this 

 writing, May 13th.] 



HISTORY OF EPICAUTA. 



It is generally stated by writers on the hiverbee that the Oil-beetle (Meloe) is one of 

 its parasites. The possibility that our more common blister-beetles were similarly par- 

 asitic on bees, taken in connection with the frequent complaints from apiarians of the 

 wholesale death of bees from causes little understood, led me, some years since, to pay 

 attention to the biological characteristics of the blister-beetles, in the hope of ascer- 

 taining whether or not they really bear any connection with bee mortality. From 

 these investigations I am satisfied that Meloe is only parasitic on the perfect hive-bee, 

 as it is on so many other winged insects that frequent flowers, and that it cannot well, 

 in tixe nature of the case, breed in the cells of any social bee whose young are fed by 

 nurses in open cells. 



I have had no difficulty in getting the eggs or the first larva of several of our vesicants, 

 and described some of them at the Hartford (1874) meeting of the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science; but these young larvae refused to climb on to plants 

 furnished to them, or to fasten to bees or other hairy insects. Nor would they nourish 

 upon honey, bee-bread, or bee larvae on which they were placed. They showed a pro- 

 clivity for burrowing in the ground, and acted quite differently from those 

 of Meloe or Sitaris, which not only readily attach to bees in confinement, 

 but which, in the case of Meloe, I have known to so crowd upon mature 

 hive-bet s as to worry them to death and cause extended loss in the apiary. 

 Explorations into the nests of solitary bees gave no clew, and, in fact, the 

 immense numbers in which the more common blister-beetles occur ren- 

 dered a parasitic life upon such bees highly improbable. In sweeping 

 plants and flowers with the net, I had never met with any of the first larvaa 

 Pio 30 — Epi- """ith which I had become familiar, as already indicated ; while I had on 

 CAUTA viTTATA: scvoral occasions, in digging ground where there was no trace of bee- 

 norma orm. j^^^^^^ j^^^ with the curious pseudo-pupa so characteristic of the family. 

 While analogy and the law of unity of habit in epecies of the same family pointed, 



