266 
Beetles 
Buprestidae, of which over two hundred species occur in North America. 
The adult beetles have an elongate body, trim and compact, with a rigid 
and armor-plate-like cuticle, and have iridescent metallic coloring. Green, 
violet, reddish, blue, copper, golden they may be, always shining like 
burnished metal and the whole body looking as if cast in bronze. The 
antennae are short and serrate on the inner margin, the head deeply inserted 
in the thorax, and the latter fitting closely against the 
abdomen and wing-covers; and the second and third 
abdominal segments are rigidly fused. These beetles are 
diurnal, running actively on tree-trunks or resting on 
flowers; seeming to delight in the warm bright sunlight, 
in which their resplendent colors flash and glance like 
jewels. 
The larvae are mostly wood-borers, although those of 
some of the smaller species mine in leaves or live in galls. 
The wood-boring Buprestid larvae are characterized by the 
strangely enlarged and flattened, legless, first thoracic 
segment, on which the small head with its powerful jaws 
sets in front, and the tapering, flattened, legless, meso- 
and meta-thoracic segments behind. The abdomen is 
elongate and rather narrow, the segments showing dis¬ 
tinctly. The whole larva (Fig. 365) is thus a footless whitish tadpole-like 
grub, expressively known as a flat-headed or hammer-headed borer. The 
larvae that do not burrow in wood are cylindrical and have three pairs of legs. 
The most injurious Buprestid is the notorious flat-headed apple-tree 
borer, Chrysobothris jemorata (Fig. 366), an obscure bronze or greenish- 
black beetle about half an inch long. The legs and 
under side of the body are of burnished copper, and 
the antennae green. The eggs are glued to the bark 
under scales or in cracks; the young larva on hatching 
eats inward through the bark to the sapwood and 
there burrows about, sometimes quite girdling the tree. 
Later it bores into the solid heart-wood, working up¬ 
ward and then again out into the bark, where it forms 
a cell in which it pupates, issuing as an adult in just Fia 366. _ Apple-tree 
about one year from the time of its hatching. This borer, Chrysobothris 
pest attacks peach- and plum-trees and several forest- femorata. (Twice 
and shade-trees as well as the apple-tree. It ranges 
over the whole country. To prevent the egg-laying on the bark, the lower 
trunk of the tree should be washed with fish-oil soap during June and July. 
When borers are once in the tree, cutting them out is the only remedy. 
The genus Agrilus contains a number of species having the head flatly 
Fig. 365.—A flat¬ 
headed borer, 
larva of Rha- 
gium lineatum. 
(Natural size.) 
