Kinsey: Gall Wasp Genus Cynips 
429 
Most of the Cynipidae do not make distinctions between the 
several species of Middle-Western chestnut oaks. Beutenmiil- 
ler’s 1900 record (in Ashmead in Smith (1900:548)), and 
Viereck’s 1916 records of Q. ilicifolia as the host are certainly 
errors, while the Q. macrocarpa records should apply to vari- 
ety macrescens. 
Mature galls of this variety in the American Museum are 
dated September 11 (1904). Bassett collected galls in Octo- 
ber, finding that the insects had begun to eat passages thru 
the walls of the galls on October 20, altho the first emergence 
occurred on November 29. Galls I collected in Virginia on 
October 18 (1919) showed exit holes, but whether of gall 
makers, inquilines, or parasites, I cannot determine. An 
adult gall maker was alive in a gall I collected on October 31 
(in 1920) at Nashville, Indiana. I have bred adults on De- 
cember 20 and January 5 (1928). Bassett (1870) notes that 
the peculiar, acid odor characteristic of several short-winged 
cynipids is found in hirta. 
This insect is very close to variety macrescens from which 
it appears to be distinguished only by the longer wings and 
by the large, spherical gall. From variety undulata, hirta 
appears to differ in having the antennae darker at base, the 
lateral lines absent, and the mesopieura more hairy. But altho 
I have examined the holotypes of all of these insects, and 
made direct comparisons of paratypes of the three, I am not 
certain that I could determine additional insect material with- 
out locality records or galls. On the other hand, the galls of 
the three are so distinct that, with the additional host and 
geographic peculiarities of each, the varieties should be main- 
tained as distinct. The much reduced thorax and the mere 
stubs of wings which these forms of Acraspis show offer very 
few characters for taxonomic determinations. The charac- 
ters given for these agamic insects by Weld (1922) in his key 
to Acraspis did not seem to me to separate the paratypes of 
the several varieties when I studied them at Washington a 
couple of years ago. 
