December, ’23] 
HERRICK: BIOLOGY OF DESMOCERUS 
547 
That season I took over seventy between June 20 and July 25, nearly 
always on early elder growing in woodland glades and generally on the 
foliage.” The writer has taken the beetles at Ithaca on both the golden 
elder and the common wild elder. I have also collected it on the wild 
elder at Deposit, N. Y. 
The beetle has been present here at Ithaca for some years on the 
golden elder used in lawn plantings. The larvae have proved to be 
seriously injurious to this very useful and beautiful shrub, greatly mar¬ 
ring its symmetry and beauty by reason of the dead and dying branches 
that occur here and there throughout the growth. 
The larvae work at the bases of the stems partly above ground but 
mostly below the soil. Their burrows run nearly parallel with the long 
axis of the stem and are usually packed full of castings. From six to 
eight inches above the soil the stems are full of the exit holes of the beetles 
while the interior is often riddled with burrows of the larvae. 
The larva is creamy-white and when full-grown and extended is 
fully an inch in length and some specimens exceed an inch. The head 
is brown and the mandibles black in color. The prothorax is wide and 
flattened and each of the first seven abdominal segments bears a flattened 
area on the dorsal side reminding one of the much more prominent 
callosities on the dorsal sides of the segment of the larva of Mallodon 
melanopus. The pupa is slightly more than three-fourths of an inch in 
length and its appearance is well shown in plate 7. 
The adults begin to appear here at Ithaca in June. My notes record 
one adult on June 14 and another on June 18. On June 13 I found three 
adults that had transformed in the larval burrows in the stems below 
ground but had not yet emerged. In the cages to which larvae were 
transferred on March 30, adults emerged (4 of them) as early as May 30 
(1910). It is probable that the transformations of these specimens 
were accelerated somewhat by the unnatural conditions in which the 
larvae found themselves and perhaps the temperature was somewhat 
higher in the cages than in the portions of the elder below ground. 
The beetles feed to some extent on the foliage of the elder, eating in¬ 
ward from the edges and producing notches in the leaves. One female 
was present on the plant and her activities followed for a little more than 
a week. The male was present on the 23rd of June and the two were in 
copulation at this time. 
On June 14 I found what I supposed were the eggs deposited by an- 
other female present on the foliage. I had expected to find the eggs white 
in color and supposed they would be deposited on the bark near the bases 
