ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 



PHILADELPHIA, PA., APRIL, 



Swat the Fly Versus Starve the Brute. 



This is the time of year when we think of many problems in 

 relation to domestic animals and plants. There is a renewed 

 effort to increase the egg-laying capacity of the domestic hen 

 and to decrease the activity of the cootie. The house-fly is a 

 domesticated animal and many so-called sanitarians are wag- 

 ing a war on this dipteron on account of its disease-transmit- 

 ting proclivities. The cry has been taken up to ''swat the fly," 

 and so far as we know the word "swat" was coined by a 

 Kansan who used the term to sell illustrated postal cards. The 

 numbers of Mitsca domestica in a community form a rather 

 exact index of the amount of fermenting and decomposing 

 vegetable and animal matter that has become derelict and mis- 

 placed, and if one pair of flies, barring accident, will produce 

 billions of progeny in a single season, their early stages would 

 eat millions of pounds, or thousands of tons, of filth. It is 

 quite possible that this material is a distinct menace to health 

 and man should do his own scavenger work and not shove it 

 on to the proboscis of the poor fly. Buzzards and vultures 

 would not be tolerated and protected as scavengers if they 

 came into our houses and visited the cream pitcher and the 

 butter plate. It is time for our sanitarians to get busy, have 

 all filth removed from cities once a week and starve the fly, 

 and then there would be more time to study the nidification 

 of the hen. The fly swatter could also be relegated to the 

 museum as a curiosity. HENRY SKINNER. 



Crabro montanus Cresson. (Hym.). 



Strand, in Archiv fur Naturgeschichte, 1916, p. 98, points out that 

 Crabro montanus Cresson, 1865, is a homonym of C. nwntanits Gistel 

 1857, and proposes for Cresson's- species the new name montivagans. 

 It is hard to understand why he did not at least look in Dalla Torre's 

 catalogue, where he would have found the available name Crabro 

 cristatus Packard. In our modern nomenclature, the species will be 

 Solcnius cristatus. T. D. A. COCKEREI.L, Boulder, Colorado. 



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