1950] 
Wheeler — Ant Larvae 
113 
1918. The Australian ants of the ponerine tribe Cerapachyini. Proc. 
Amer. Acad. Arts. Sci. 53: 215-265, 17 fig. 
1920. The subfamilies of Formicidae, and other taxonomic notes. 
Psyche 27: 46-55, 3 fig. 
1922. The ants collected by the American Museum Congo Expedition. 
Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. 45: 39-269, 22 pi., 76 text fig., 41 
maps. 
The Northernmost Extension of Bird Hippoboscidae in the 
New World (Diptera). — The Hippoboscidae are essentially a 
tropical and subtropical group of insects. In cold temperate regions 
the number of species is very small and most of them seem to occur 
only as accidental summer visitors. In the New World the 50th 
parallel forms about the northern limit for the family as a whole. 
Farther north the flies are probably not truly part of the autoch- 
thonous fauna. Among the many hundreds of North American 
flies I have seen in recent years, only half a dozen, all of one 
species, Ornithomyia fringillina Curtis, were taken in Alaska, at 
the following localities: Crater Mt., off “Columbia falcon” ; Nelchina 
River, north of Mt. Witherspoon (N.W. of Valdez) ; Takotna, 
63 °N., 165°W., off Hudsonian spruce grouse, Canachites c. can- 
adensis (Linnaeus) ; and Old Crow River, Timber Creek, Yukon. 
Takotna is the northernmost locality for a hippoboscid in the New 
World. In the eastern part of the continent these flies stay much 
farther south, the northernmost record there being an Ornithomyia 
fringillina taken by Eidmann off a junco on the Matamek River in 
the southern part of the Labrador Peninsula (50° 17 r N.). Hip- 
poboscidae of birds seem to extend farther north in Europe, where 
several species occur in Finland. One of them (0. fringillina ) has 
been reported also from Iceland. None are known from Greenland. 
Several of the common passerine birds, serving as hosts of O. 
fringillina in southern Canada and the United States, extend during 
the summer to the Arctic Circle and beyond, so that the virtual 
absence of hippoboscids from the far north is most probably due to 
adverse climatic conditions. — J. Bequaert, Museum of Compara- 
tive Zoology, Harvard University. 
