88 
NATURE NOTES 
infinitely content with a morsel of suet dangling from a tree and 
a few crumbs of bread at the bottom of an old draining pipe. 
Ankerdyne Cottage , Herbert Gibbs. 
Kniglitsford Bridge , Worcester. 
LIFE HISTORY OF A SAW-FLY. 
( Trichiosoma lucorum.) 
jjHEN the hawthorn flowers it attracts very many insects, 
I as is well known to entomologists, who often capture 
valuable specimens which have come to suck honey 
from the blossoms. Bees of many kinds, dipterous 
flies, and the curious Hymenoptera known as Saw-flies vie with 
butterflies and moths for a share of the sweets. 
Not very many people, entomologists excepted, seem to know 
anything about saw-flies, or even to recognise the family when 
they meet some of its members. A large variety of species, how- 
ever, inhabit the British Isles, and some of them are nearly as 
large as hornets, though by the uninitiated they are generally 
mistaken for bees. 
The particular species of which I wish to speak is quite 
common and may generally be seen flying about hawthorn trees 
early in the spring. In appearance it somewhat resembles a 
reddish-gray humble-bee, being covered with shaggy pubescence 
and about the same size and shape as the large white-tipped bee 
everywhere to be met with. Its life history, however, is widely 
different. Every Saw-fly goes through three stages before 
arriving at the perfect insect, viz., the egg, larva, and pupa. 
And it is from the method in which the eggs are laid that the 
Saw-fly takes its name. The female is provided with a strong 
ovipositor, serrated at the edges like a saw. With this imple- 
ment she makes incisions in a leaf, or in the case of some species, 
a twig, and deposits her eggs in the wounds. These eggs, 
unlike those of Lepidoptera, grow to nearly double or even treble 
their original size before hatching, and that they absorb nourish- 
ment from the plant in which they have been placed is evident 
from the fact that, should it wither they also perish. The larva? 
resemble, generally speaking, those of Lepidoptera, but differ 
from them in always possessing more than sixteen legs (including 
claspers) and black eye-spots. They are generally smooth, but 
may be protected with spines, or by a slimy secretion. When 
disturbed they frequently lash furiously with their tails and eject 
an evil-smelling liquid from their mouths, or they may expose 
powerful scent glands. The pupa stage is passed either in the 
ground, in rotten wood, or in pithy stems. A few make cocoons 
on the branches on which they have been feeding. The majority 
make no cocoons, merely lie up in a kind of cell hollowed out in 
