42 Bulletin 126. 



grower should therefore at once familiarize himself with the 

 workings of this new pest, and thus be prepared to check it 

 whenever any indications of its presence appear on his bushes. 



Through the kindness of Mr. B. M. Hoag, South Easton, 

 N. Y., in furnishing us an abundance of material, we have been 

 enabled to breed the insect in our cages here at the insectary dur- 

 ing the past year. Several new facts have resulted from this 

 study of the pest ; for instance, we had the pleasure of being the 

 first to see the insect perform the interesting operation of gird- 

 ling a currant shoot. (See plate IV, figure a. ) 



Historical. 



This new currant pest is an American insect. As early as 1830, 

 Dr. Harris captured a male specimen at Milton, Mass., and in 

 1832 he took a female on a window at Cambridge, Mass. Both 

 these specimens were given different manuscript names by Say, 

 but they were not described. Nearly thirty years passed before 

 the insect again received any attention. In 1861 Norton wrote a 

 description of it, evidently from Harris' specimens ; he used one. 

 of Say's names for it, and stated that it also occurred in New 

 York state. In 1862, Dr. Fitch described the same insect under 

 a new name ; he had captured it in May in New York state, and 

 thought it might possibly be the insect that was boring in the rye 

 stems. 



The insect does not seem to have been mentioned in print again 

 for a quarter of a century, or until 1888. But some of Professor 

 Comstock's old unpublished notes show that Mr. J. F. Rose, 

 South Byron, N. Y. , had observed the work of a " new borer ' ' in 

 his currants in 1882. In February and April, 1883, he sent speci- 

 mens of the injured shoots to Professor Comstock who succeeded 

 in breeding the adult insect, which he determined at the time as 

 being doubtless the insect described by Dr. Fitch in 1862. Thus 

 these observations were the first to throw any light upon the 

 habits of the insect, but as they were never published, it was not 

 until 1888 that anything was recorded about any insect girdling 

 currant shoots ; and it was not until 1891 that it was publicly 



