“50. THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
parety during the winter, the cold and damp seeming to ~ 
stupify the ants; but few of these nests are to be found 
under stones. 
Very little is found with the ants during the hot sum- 
mer months, though I have taken 7’mesiphorus, Batrisodes, 
and Hupines. 
Not every nest contains an insect, though from re- 
cent collecting, it seems that every species of ants’-nest is 
- worthy of examination. It is quite possible to search for. 
days and find nothing but ants. In the end, patience hag 
its reward, and, if at first you don’t succeed, search, search, 
and search again. \ 
EXHIBIT OF WASP COCOONS, JUNE, 1917. 
By L. Gallard. 
This cluster of cocoons was taken from the tunnel of 
a large wood-boring moth in an ironbark tree at Beecréft, 
about the middle of May. About the same time I got two 
similar clusters from a Blue Gum which some men were > 
splitting for firewood. One was broken by the splitting, 
but the other was intact., In the broken cluster severat 
nearly fully-developed wasps were exposed. In the un- 
broken cluster I estimate that’ there are between 75 and 
100 pupae, which I take to be Pimplas. The adult mea- 
sures about one and a half inches from head to tip of 
ovipositor. I got a number of other larvae, which I take 
to be the same species, in a moth- grub tunnel in Acacia 
longifolia. 
A fine pupa of Megalyra Shuckardt, exhibited, is from 
the tunnel of a beetle, Phoracantha, in A. decurrens, and 
shows the extraordinarily long ovipositor rolled: twice 
round the body. There is also shown a small beetle, 
- Stigmodera, cut out of a gall on Poltena. These galls are 
often an inch in length and three-eighths of an inch deep. 
‘The woody tissue is about a quarter of an inch in thick- 
ness, and no trace exists of a passage to the outside. The 
‘little beetle has, therefore, when mature, to eat its way 
through this barrier, and no small feat for such a little 
creature. 
