AFFECTION OF INSECTS FOR THEIR YOUNG. 203 
number, till they are hatched. This takes place in a few days; and after- 
wards she carefully feeds them in the larva state, in which the brood keeps 
together, whether eating or sleeping, in an oval mass, sitting upon them 
with outstretched wings, shading them from the heat of the sun, and pro- 
tecting them with admirable perseverance from the attacks of parasites and 
other enemies, fora period of from four to six weeks, until her death, 
According to M. Schmidberger, the female of a small wood-boring beetle 
(Zrypodendron dispar Steph.) bores in young healthy apple-trees passages 
of about an inch and a_ half in length, penetrating near to the centre, and 
deposits at the end of them in a sort of chamber from seven to ten eggs, 
the larvae from which when excluded arrange themselves in the passages 
one after another, and there feed on a white powdery substance, which he 
calls ambrosia, and supposes to be prepared by the female from the sap. 
This female, he says, never quits the passages and chambers in which her 
larvee reside, but remains with them two months or more, till they are 
become perfect beetles, and he conceives is occupied partly in laying other 
eggs, but partly also in preparing “ambrosia” for them and defending 
them from their enemies. These procedures are certainly very different 
from those we should expect in an insect in this tribe ; yet as the facts are 
stated so fully and circumstantially by a close observer, they deserve farther 
investigation from entomologists who have an opportunity of studying the 
economy of this species. 
We are indebted to De Geer for the history of a field-bug (Acanthosoma 
grisea), a species found in this country, which shows marks of affection for 
her young, such as I trust will lead you, notwithstanding any repugnant 
association that the name may call up, to search upon the birch tree, which 
it inhabits, for so interesting an insect. ~The family of this field-bug con- 
sists of thirty or forty young ones, which she conducts as a hen does her 
chickens. She never leaves them ; and-as soon as she begins to move, 
all the little ones closely follow, and whenever she stops assemble in a 
cluster round her. De Geer having had occasion to cut a branch of birch 
peopled with one of those families, the mother showed every symptom of 
excessive uneasiness. In other circumstances such an alarm would have 
caused her immediate flight ; but now she never stirred from her young, 
but kept beating her wings incessantly with a very rapid motion, evidently 
for the purpose of protecting them from the apprehended danger.3—As far 
as our knowledge of the economy of this tribe of insects extends, there is 
no other species that manifests’a similar attachment to its progeny ; but 
such may probably be discovered by future observers. It is De Geer also 
that we have to thank for-a series of interesting observations on the ma- 
ternal affection exhibited by the common earwig. This curious insect, so 
unjustly traduced by a vulgar prejudice,—as if the Creator had willed that 
the insect world should combine within itself examples of all that is most 
? Trans, Ent. Soc. Lond. i. 233. For a figure of Perga Zewisit see Mr. West- 
Wood's valuable and beautiful “ Arcana Entomologica,” No, 2. plate 7. fig. 1. 
Kéllar’s Ins. inj. to Gardeners, &c. 254—262. ‘There seems to be a considerable 
resemblance between the “ambrosia” above mentioned and the globules of a kind 
of “mucor, ” found by Smeathman and Kénig in the nurseries of the African and 
Bast, Indian Termites, and still more the * gelatinous particles not unlike gum 
arabic,” which Latreille observed in the galleries of Termes lucifugus in the trunks 
of pines and oaks, (See Lurrern XVII. On Perfect Societies of Insects— White 
Ants, S De Geer, iii, 262. 
