Fabre has also, in a lively and well-written account, given a history of Sitaris, a European beetle, somewhat resembling Meloe. He states that Sitaris lays its eggs near the entrance of bees' nests, and at the very moment that the bee lays her egg in the honey cell, the flattened, ovate Sitaris larva drops from the body of the bee upon which it has been living, and feasts upon the contents of the freshly laid egg. After eating this delicate morsel it devours the honey in the cells of the bee and changes into a white, cylindrical, nearly footless grub, and after it is full-fed, and has assumed a supposed "pupa" state, the skin, without bursting, incloses a kind of hard "pupa" skin, which is very similar in outline to the former larva, within whose skin is found a whitish larva which directly changes into the true pupa. In a succeeding state this pupa in the ordinary way changes to a beetle which belongs to the same group of Coleoptera as Meloe. We cannot but think, from observations made on the humble bee, the wasp, two species of moths and several other insects, that this "hyper-metamorphosis" is not so abnormal a mode of insect metamorphosis as has been supposed, and that the changes of these insects, made beneath the skin of the mature larva before assuming the pupa state, are almost as remarkable as those of Meloe and Sitaris, though less easily observed than they. Several other beetles allied to Meloe are known to be parasitic on wild bees, though the accounts of them are fragmentary. THE STYLOPS PARASITE. The history of Stylops, a beetle allied to Meloe, is no less strange than that of Meloe, and is in some respects still more interesting. On June 18th I captured an Andrena vicina which had been "stylopized." On looking at my capture I saw a pale reddish-brown triangular mark on the bee's abdomen; this was the flattened head and thorax of a female Stylops (Fig. 39_a_, position of the female of Stylops, seen in profile in the abdomen of the bee; Fig. 39_b_, the female seen from above. The head and thorax are soldered into a single flattened mass, the baggy hind-body being greatly enlarged like that of the gravid female of the white ant, and consisting of nine segments). [Illustration: 39. Female Stylops.] On carefully drawing out the whole body (Pl. 1, Fig. 6, as seen from above, and showing the alimentary canal ending in a blind sac; Fig. 6_a_, side view), which is very extensible, soft and baggy, and examining it under a high power of the microscope, we saw multitudes, at least several hundred, of very minute larvae, like particles of dust to the naked eye, issuing in every direction from the body of the parent now torn open in places, though most of them made their exit through an opening on the under side of the head-thorax. The Stylops, being hatched while still in the body of the parent, is, therefore viviparous. She probably never lays eggs.