THE ORCHID REVIEW. 195 
in number—all very beautiful, I admit—and only one had failed to secure 
an award. There was a general air of got-no-work-to-do about the Com- 
mittee, and yet in an adjoining tent there were three splendid groups, con- 
taining several subjects fully deserving of recognition, could they only have 
been adjudicated upon. I suppose they had not been entered, and there- 
fore the Committee could not look at them. And yet, somehow, I thought 
it was to be a combined meeting with the local Horticultural Society, and 
had looked on it as a rather interesting experiment. True, it was a sort of 
extra meeting, but so far as Orchids were concerned it left something to be 
desired, and the next time such a meeting is held it would be advisable to 
alter the arrangements. 
ARGUS. 
A DENDROBIUM BEETLE, DIAXENES DENDROBII, 
SoME time ago there seemed a possibility that this beetle would prove a 
great pest in Orchid collections, and we note with interest that its life- 
history has now been worked out by Dr. R. Stewart Macdougal, M.A., and 
is published in the recently issued Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden, 
Edinburgh, pp. 1-12, illustrated with two plates, showing the insect in its 
various stages and the mischief it does. In December, 1896, the author 
was asked to visit an Orchid Housein Midlothian, where a number of plants 
had been ruined by some agency or other, and on cutting open some dis- 
coloured patches on the pseudobulbs he found the larve of a longicorn 
beetle in various stages. Some of these were removed to the Royal 
Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, and six adult beetles of Diaxenes Dendrobii 
were bred out in the following March. With these he proceeded to work 
out the life-history of the insect in one of the houses there. The infected 
Orchids were said to have come from Burma, and this was afterwards 
proved, for some plants of Dendrobium nobile, bought for the Royal Botanic 
Garden at a sale in London, were found to be affected, and from them the 
same beetle was bred. It may be mentioned that the beetles measure from 
10 to 17 millimetres long, and are typically night feeders, of sluggish habit, 
resting by day at the base of the plant, or among the moss, but that, owing 
to protective colouring, they are very difficult to detect. The eggs are laid 
singly in the pseudobulbs, often at the apex, and hatch in about a fortnight, 
when the larve bore a tunnel down the bulb, and in time mine away all the 
soft parts. Almost any pseudobulbous Orchid seems to serve as food, for in 
the original infected house larve were taken from four specimens of 
Dendrobium, two species of Cattleya, and Lelia anceps, while the experi- 
ments were carried out on Lelia anceps, Ccelogyne cristata, C. flaccida, and 
Odontoglossum citrosmum, in each case the feeding larve quite ruining the 
plants. The perfect beetles are also-very destructive, and live for a con 
