STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
797 
OAK. LIMBS. 
•ward, the sides arc straight. The long thread-like antennae are dull yellow, with a slight 
duskiness at the end of each joint. The legs are blackish with the bases of the thighs, and 
frequently of the shanks also, pale dull yellow, the hind thighs being less thickened towards 
their tips than the four forward ones. 
AFFECTING TIIE LIMBS AND TWIGS. 
305. Oak fruxeb, Elaphidion putator, Peck. (Colcoptcra. Cerambycidae.) 
[See Report Third, plate 2, fig. 2.] 
The limbs towards their ends cut smoothly off, transversely, the latter 
part of summer, and found through the autumn and winter lying on the 
ground beneath the trees with their withered leaves adhering to them ; a 
hole bored in their severed end, and extending up their center, in which 
lies a white footless worm, over a half inch long and a fourth as broad, 
slightly tapering and divided into twelve rings by very broad deep con¬ 
strictions; changing to a somewhat active pupa within the limb, from 
which in June comes a slender cylindrical long-horned beetle half 
an inch long, of a dull black color with brownish wing-covers which 
have two sharp points at their tips and ash-gray hairs forming small spots 
here and there, its thorax with coarse close punctures and its under side 
and legs chestnut colored. 
The singular habit of this insect of severing the limb in which it is 
cradled and dropping itself herein to the ground, varying its operations to 
accord with the size and nature of the limb, renders it one of the most 
interesting native species of our country. Its biography has never yet 
been written, that I am aware, except very imperfectly. The leading facts 
in its life were first made known in the year 1819, by Prof. Peck, in an 
article published in the Massachusetts Agricultural Repository, vol. v. pp. 
307—311, accompanied with a plate; and some slight additions arc made 
thereto, by Dr. Harris, in his Treatise, p. 86. 
The purpose for which this insect cuts off the limb, is probably as Prof. 
Peck, suggests; as the worm is to remain in the limb through the winter, 
it appears to forsee that, from being wounded as it is, it will perish and 
become too dry if it remains elevated in the air; it therefore drops it to 
the earth, where, lying among the fallen leaves and buried beneath the 
winter’s snowS, it remains moist and adapted for the development of the 
insect within it. 
The severed limbs arc usually but eighteen inches or two feet in length, 
but Prof. Peek states that limbs an inch in thickness and five feet in length 
are sometimes found. I have seen a limb cut off by this insect, which was 
ten feet in length and an inch and a tenth in thickness, and have repeatedly 
met with them seven and eight feet long, and usually an inch, but in one 
instance an inch and a quarter in thickness. 
The parent beetle seems aware that her progeny, in their infancy, will 
be too feeble to masticate the hard woody fibres of the limb, bhc there¬ 
fore selects one of the small twigs which branch off from it, which is not 
thicker than a goose quill, with its base composed of soft wood, the growth 
