March 1897.] BeUTENMULLER : NOTE ON CaTOCALA ElDA. 17 
around the femora of the meso- and meta-thoracic legs, then meeting 
on the median ventral line between them. 
As the pupa grows older the eyes, wing parts, parts of the legs and 
antennae and the tips of the mandibles begin to turn much darker. 
Soror is especially injurious to the interests of the flower-grower. 
The beetles eat unsightly holes in the buds and petals of roses and 
chrysanthemums, and other showy flowers. It feeds on leaves too, and 
is almost unrestricted in range of food-plants. Fruit-growers often suf¬ 
fer serious loss by the beetle’s eating the young forming fruit. The 
apricot seems especially the object of attack. Hardly any kind of gar¬ 
den vegetable is free from its attention. 
The eggs are deposited, in breeding jars or out of doors, from % 
to an inch below the surface of the ground, near the base of some 
plant, sometimes singly but usually in numbers of from 20 to 50. The 
eggs hatched in the breeding jars in about eighteen days. The lame 
developed slowly. Larvae of various sizes, some full grown, some 
newly hatched*. were found around the roots of different plants out of 
doors in March, April and May. The larvae do not bore into the roots, 
as longicornis and 12-punctata do, but eat the roots from the outside, 
sometimes cutting the young rootlets entirely in two. The larvae were 
found in abundance feeding on the roots of sweet-peas and alfalfa, and 
sparingly on other plants. 
As the larva becomes full-grown it approaches the surface of the 
ground and forms an oval or spherical cell in which it lies ten or twelve 
days, semi-quiescent, before pupation. The pupal stage lasts from ten to 
fourteen days. The first out-of-doors pupae were found early in April. 
No special opportunity of combatting the pest is offered by its im¬ 
mature stages. The wide range of food-plants of larva and adult, and 
the underground life of the immature stages, make it a particularly 
difficult insect to fight. 
NOTE ON CATOCALA ELDA Behr. 
By Wm. Beutenmuller. 
This insect was described as a distinct species from a specimen 
taken in Oregon. Since then three examples have been taken in British 
Columbia, and last summer Mr. Doll raised a single specimen from a 
larva found on Long Island, N. Y. It is, without doubt, nothing more 
than a gray variety of C. relicta. Mr. Palm already called attention 
to this fact. (Journ. N. Y. Ent. Soc., I, p. 21.) 
