21 
PAPERS READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY. 
NOTES ON SESIA ANDRENIFORMIS. 
(Read December 15tb, 1908, by E. A. COCKAYNE, F.E.S., F.L.S.) 
I am venturing to read these notes of my own experiences with 
this insect, not pretending that they are anything but a very 
incomplete account of its life history, but rather to provoke discussion 
and elicit further information. Since the publication of the Hon. N. 
L. Rothschild’s note in the Entomologist's Monthly Magazine , 1906, 
and in the Ivans. Knt. Soc. of the same year, it has been found over a 
\ety wide area. I have taken it in Essex, Kent, Surrey (many 
localities), Gloucester and Somerset, in fact, wherever I have found 
the food-plant growing suitably, except in the Mendip Hills in the last 
named county, in which it is either very scarce or absent. The way¬ 
faring tree (Viburnum lantana) is its usual food-plant. 
Our other species of this genus, the guelder-rose, Viburnum opulus, 
grows in such different situations, choosing marshy rather than dry 
and exposed ground, that one has few opportunities of seeing the two 
side by side. Tn Somerset, where both were growing freely in one 
wood, many of the bushes of J r . lantana had a few exit holes of the 
moth ; but though, in some cases, branches of the one species, 
containing these, were interlaced with those of the other, I could find 
no signs that the insect had ever attacked I . opulus. It is, however, 
recorded as a food-plant at Bleiburg in Austria by Max Bartel, at 
Tring by Rothschild, and Mr. Edelsten mentioned at the meeting that 
he had found old borings in the Fens. The common elder, Sambucus 
nigra, belongs to an allied genus, but I was unable to find any trace 
of the insect having fed on this tree, even where it was growing 
amongst bushes riddled by 5. andreniformis. The favourite home of 
the clearwing is a sunny slope of chalk or limestone, with many 
scattered bushes of V. lantana, but it is also to be found in uncut and 
occasionally in trimmed hedges, or more rarely in damp shady woods, 
where their food-plant has quite a different habit of growth, with long 
straggling stems and fewer, but larger, leaves of thin texture. It is 
not particular as to which quarter a slope faces ; nor have I been able 
to confirm Mr. Percy Reid’s statement that the exit holes always face 
in one direction. I have found them facing in all directions, even on 
opposite sides of the same stem. 
The larva? may be discovered in the smallest or largest bushes, 
boring, in some cases, into a stem only just big enough to hold them, 
in others into one thicker than one’s wrist; twice I have found the 
cap on the thick main stem, while the pupa was in a tiny side twig. 
They may be at any height, from the level of the ground to the 
terminal twigs of the largest trees. 
Of the ovum, I know nothing, nor of the very young larva, which 
may be, as Tutt has suggested in the case of other Sesiida?, an external 
xix. 
