172 Bulletin 190. 



with pieces of meat (" liglits ") and sugar water ; in dry weather 

 they often caught half a basinful in a night ! Another grower 

 caught enormous numbers of the beetles by ])ouring about half an 

 inch of tar in the bottoni of the basin traps. Doubtless any kinds 

 of spare waste meat or lish would prov-e equally attractive to the 

 beetles, and some cover such meat with thick sacking and then col- 

 lect by hand those which gather around and under this bait. These 

 trapping methods involve considerable trouble and expense, but one 

 had better spend $25 in thus protecting a $250 crop of strawberries 

 which the beetles are capable of ruining in a few days. 



A sure, practicable, although laborious method is to " hand-pick " 

 or collect the beetles from their hiding places during the day under 

 lumps of dirt or just beneath the surface of the soil near the base of 

 the plants. The removal of the mulch would facilitate this in many 

 cases. Children could readily be induced to collect the beetles for 

 a small sum per 100. For studying the general structure of an 

 insect, the larger kind of these ground-beetles (figure 41) are excel- 

 lent aids in a laboratory. For this purpose the Entomological 

 Laboratory of Cornell University paid one cent each for 1,700 of the 

 beetles, which boys easily collected in the strawberry patch of our 

 Leechburg, Pa., correspondent, and the crop of beetles must have 

 been materially reduced thereby. We believe that $35 paid to 

 children for collecting would have saved most of the $350 worth of 

 fruit which the beetles got at Leechburg. 



