THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



61 



or dotted with red and black, and are truly voracious creatures 

 with appetites out of all proportion toltheir size. They can eat 

 their weight in plant lice in a very short time. They travel 

 through a colony of plant lice like a farmer cutting grain, and 

 few escape. Seldom is an insect so unequivocably the friend of 

 man as the lady bug. The dragonfly, otherwise known as 

 snake feeder, devil's darning needle and mosquito hawk, which 

 pursues the mosquito in all its varieties, disguises, and haunts, 

 may claim to be first in the list of beneficial insects, but the lady 

 bug is at least second. 



Nectar from Fir Trees. — Do the fresh-grown tips of the 

 fir trees secrete or shed a sap-like substance ? On June 

 14, I found a bumblebee very busy on one of the newly- 

 grown tips of the fir and after I got him tO' take his 

 departure, I broke of¥ the tip and found it to be wet 

 with a sweet sticky substance that tasted strongly of the fir. 

 About a mile further on, I was about to pick a bunch 

 of ferns and found them covered with the same sticky sub- 

 stance. Looking up, I discovered another fir tree which ap- 

 peared to be shedding this sticky sap. Is this a common occur- 

 rence? — Miss Lilian A. Cole, Union, Maine. [The writer sug- 

 gests that the sweet substance may have been honey-dew excre- 

 ted by plant lice which might have been feeding on the young 

 tips. This could only be ascertained by an examination of the 

 specimens in question. It is a fact, however, that the young 

 coues of certain evergreens excrete nectar and ants often ascend 

 such trees in great numbers for the sake of it. We are accus- 

 tomed to think of flowers, alone, as producers of nectar, but 

 many leaves and leaf-stalks do the same and even plants, such as 

 the ferns, which never bear flowers, have nectaries on the leaves 

 and excrete this same sweet fluid. From the fact that the sub- 

 stance in question had a flavor of fir in it, we are inclined to 

 think that it was nectar secreted by the tree. — Ed.] 



