Natural history of insects : comprising their architecture, transformations, senses, food, habits--collection, preservation and arrangement . spot; but the bedeguar-insect lays a large clusterof eggs on the extremity of a growing branch of thewild rose-tree, making, probably, a proportionatenumber of punctures to procure materials for thefuture habitation of her young progeny. As in theformer case also, each of these eggs becomes (as wemay suppose) surrounded with the sap of the rose,enclosed in a pellicle of gluten. The gluten, how-ever, of the bedeguar insect is not, it would appear,sufficie


Natural history of insects : comprising their architecture, transformations, senses, food, habits--collection, preservation and arrangement . spot; but the bedeguar-insect lays a large clusterof eggs on the extremity of a growing branch of thewild rose-tree, making, probably, a proportionatenumber of punctures to procure materials for thefuture habitation of her young progeny. As in theformer case also, each of these eggs becomes (as wemay suppose) surrounded with the sap of the rose,enclosed in a pellicle of gluten. The gluten, how-ever, of the bedeguar insect is not, it would appear,sufficiently tenacious to confine the flowing sapwithin the dimensions of any of the little clusteredglobes containing the eggs, for it oozes out fromnumerous cracks or pores in the pellicle; which GALL-FLIES. 377 cracks or pores, however, are not large enough toadmit a human hair. But this, so far from being adefect in the glutinous pclhcle of the bedeguar fly,is, as we shall presently see, of great utility. Thesap which issues from each of those pores, instead ofbeing evaporated and lost, shoots out into a reddish-coloured, fibrous One of the hristles of the Bedeguar of the rose magnified. It is about half an inch long, and, from the naturaltendency of the sap of the rose tree to form prickles,these are all over studded with weak pricklets. Thebedeguar, accordingly, when fully formed, has someresemblance, at a httle distance, to a tuft of reddish-brown hair or moss, stuck upon the branch. Some-times this tuft is as large as a small apple, and of arounded, but irregular shape; at other times it issmaller, and in one instance mentioned by Reau-mur, only a single egg had been laid on a rose leaf,and consequently, only one tuft was member of the congeries is furnished with itsown tuft of bristles, arising from the little hollowglobe in which the egg or the grub is lodged. The prospective wisdom of this curious structureis admirable. The bedeguar grubs live in thei


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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookidnaturalhistoryof01bos, booksubjectinsects