Identified for the writer by Professor Peck from painting and description.
Taste and smell slight. Cooks well and is pleasant to the taste. The tubes should be removed.
Subtomento´si—sub, tomentosus, downy.
Pileus when young villose or subtomentose, rarely becoming glabrous with age, destitute of a viscid pellicle. Tubes of one color, adnate. Stem at first extended, neither bulbous nor reticulated with veins, wrinkled or striated in some species. Flesh in some changing color where wounded.
The tubes are generally yellow or greenish-yellow. In some species they are occasionally somewhat depressed around the stem, but they do not form a rounded free stratum, nor, with the exception of B. rubeus, are they stuffed when young as in most of the Edules. The species are scarcely separable from those of the preceding tribe except by the more evidently tomentose young pileus.
| Tubes brown, becoming cinnamon | B. variegatus | |
| Tubes not having these colors | 1 | |
| 1. | Flesh or tubes changing to blue where wounded | 2 |
| 1. | Flesh or tubes not changing to blue | 5 |
| 2. Stem glabrous | 3 | |
| 2. Stem not glabrous | 4 | |
| 3. | Flesh yellow under the cuticle | B. rubeus |
| 3. | Flesh red under the cuticle | B. chrysenteron |
| 4. Stem velvety at the base | B. striæpes | |
| 4. Stem with a reddish bloom or scurf | B. radicans | |
| 4. Stem with brown dot-like scales | B. mutabilis | |
| 5. | Tubes whitish, becoming yellow | B Roxanæ |
| 5. | Tubes yellow | 6 |
| 6. Tube mouths large and angular | B. subtomentosus | |
| 6. Tube mouths minute | B. spadiceus | |
| Peck, Boleti of the U.S. |
B. variega´tus Swartz. Pileus at first convex, then plane, obtuse, moist, sprinkled with superficial bundled hairy squamules, dark-yellow, the acute margin at first flocculose. Flesh yellow, here and there becoming blue. Tubes adnate, unequal, minute, brown then cinnamon. Stem firm, equal, even, dark-yellow, sometimes reddish. Spores oblong-ellipsoid, hyaline or very pale-yellowish, 7.5–10×3–4µ.
Pileus 2–5 in. broad. Stem 2–3 in. long, 6 lines thick.
Woods, especially of pine. North Carolina, Curtis, Schweinitz; California, Harkness, Moore; Rhode Island, Bennett. Peck, Boleti of the U.S.
West Virginia mountains, 1882–1885. Haddonfield, N.J., McIlvaine; Doylestown, Pa., Paschall. Quite common on flat benches where hemlocks and spruces have grown.