78 BULLETIN NO. 4, DIVISION OF ENTOMOLOGY. 



Khinoceros Beetle— Sand Bee— Cattle Tick. 



dura of what I now |tappose was a rare opportunity to have studied this 

 beetle. None is to be found. I am ashamed to own it, and to offer my 

 memory of what occurred years ago. In fact, at the time, I noticed such 

 things merely for my passing pleasure, without the least notion of in- 

 teresting the world. It was as I mentioned: In March of 1868, a large 

 post-oak tree I had cut for rails, posts, and wood, was found hollow at the 

 top; the cavity some 10 feet long, and branching into the larger limbs, 

 by 12 inches in diameter. I do not recollect seeing any large opening 

 into the cavity. There were small holes, such as might have been 

 made by woodpeckers and squirrels. Within, the trunk contained no 

 nests of birds or other animals, but some decaying acorn hulls, sticks, 

 and leaves. The lower half contained a black, damp mass of decaying 

 vegetable matter, rotten wood and fungi. In this rotten and decaying 

 mass were numbers of grubs, evidently grubs of beetles, and in size from 

 1 inch to 4 in length; at the top, in looser, drier matter, were several 

 pupa?, and amongst the old sticks and leaves numbers of perfect beetles, 

 most of them dead and in pieces, but a few still alive. * * * 



I send you a small tin box containing the nest of a sand bee of some 

 kind. There were four cells originally, as plowed up in a cotton field 

 6 miles northeast of Selma, but the curiosity of a companion destroyed 

 two of them before I was aware. A more curious thing, also, in the 

 box — unless you have seen the same before — is a large tick laying her 

 eggs. On the 10th of March the tick was found, full of blood, at the foot 

 of a bank, where a cow had recently rubbed it off after carrying it all 

 winter. I placed it in a box, with loose cotton on top. Two weeks 

 later, looking at it, I found it had shrunken to half its original size, and 

 the first mass of eggs was extruded. It should have been sent you 

 then, but I was busy about other things and it was overlooked. Now, 

 after eighteen days, it has continued to lay, and another mass is hang- 

 ing to it, whilst the skin seems shrunken very much. — [Lawrence 0. 

 Johnson, Sehna y Ala., April 20, 1883. 



[The nest of the "sand bee" was that of a species of Osmia, and the 

 tick was the common Ixodes bonis.] 



Tee Screw Worm. 



Permit me to call your attention to the Texas u Screw Worm," which 

 was very troublesome to stock in Kansas last year. I am medically 

 informed it is the Sarcophaga georgina. I send you a larval specimen. 

 It kills a great many animals and some people. Neglected babies, 

 children, and adults with nasal catarrh are sometimes afflicted and 

 killed by it. We are told that it flies into the nose of a man the same as 

 the bot-fly in the nostrils of a sheep, and lays its eggs or young. In ani- 

 iinals a wound or blood attracts it. Calomel, chloroform, and carbolic 



