41 
Description of the Ox Warble Fly. —The Ox Warble Fly, or Bot 
Fly, the Hypoderma bovis scientifically, is a two-winged fly, of 
about half an inch to three-fifths of an inch in length, and so 
banded and marked with long thick differently coloured hair as to 
be not unlike a Humble Bee. 
The head is large and somewhat hemispherical, and has a 
very small mouth-opening, with rudimentary proboscis, and, their 
mouths being thus atrophied, appear to be unable to take food; 
face clothed with whitish or yellowish hairs, the hinder part of the 
head with blackish hairs. The body between the wings brownish 
or yellowish before the transverse suture, dull blackish behind it, 
with four broad, naked, and shining long stripes of a deeper black 
colour. Scutellum (small portion of the hinder edge of the thorax 
just before the abdomen) with shining black edge, otherwise with 
yellow hair. Tufts of whitish yellow hairs under the roots of 
the wings. 
Abdomen usually whitish or yellowish at the base, banded with 
black across the middle, and yellow or some shade of orange at 
the tip. * 
Wings large, pale smoky brown, clearer at the tip; alulets 
(enlargement at the base of the wings) very large, white, with 
yellow-brown border. Legs black-brown, with feet and some other 
parts yellow in the female. 
The ovipositor or eyy-layiny tube is formed of a kind of telescope¬ 
like apparatus of four articles appended to the abdomen of the 
female, of joints which can be passed within each other. “When 
it is extended it projects backwards and slightly upwards, and at 
the end of the last article are three horny appendages, a little 
curved inwards toward each other, like pincers, between which the 
eggs pass out.” f 
The eggs (fig. 1, p. 39) are white, elongated, spindle-shaped, and a 
little flattened, with a brownish appendage, which appears to be 
* In the case of twenty-five Ox Warble Flies, reared from maggots captured 
as they left the Warbles, by Mr. A. C. C. Martyn, Agricultural College, Aspatria, 
of which he sent me observations; with five out of the twenty-five, the terminal 
portion of the abdomen beyond the transverse black band was grey, instead of 
yellow or orange. A somewhat similar variety is mentioned in the ‘ Monographic 
der CEstriden,’ von Friedrich Brauer, p. 127. Here Dr. Brauer mentions that 
he was indebted to Prof. Low for the sight of a beautiful variety of this species 
from Asia Minor. This differed from the ordinary individuals in all the hairs, 
which are yellow in these, being here of a clear white. 
t See 1 Parasites and Parasitic Diseases,’ by Prof. L. G. Neumann, translated 
by Geo. Fleming, C.B., LL.D., &c., p. 47, and figs. p. 49. 
