Insect Pests. 235 



moved, as it should be, these bands are the most available 

 place for them to to hide. 



They should be examined every six or ten days and all 

 worms destroyed. Do this thoroughly from June 15th to 

 August 15th, and you will have but few wind falls. 



In my experience the next place belongs to the apple cur- 

 culio or gouger, though fortunately his work is not so wide- 

 spread and general, his mission being especially to punish 

 the shiftless, negligent cultivator who allows quantities of 

 worthless trash in shape of seedling apples, crab apples, wild 

 crabs and plums, morello and bird cherries, etc., to cumber 

 his ground in hedge-rows, fence-corners and neglected places, 

 all bearing their truits, too poor to sell or use and not con- 

 venient for the pigs to gather, therefore allowed to become 

 aperfect nursery and breeding ground for the gouger. 



I have in this way succeeded in raising perhaps the finest 

 army of these busy little workers in the state, and they now 

 relieve me from all care or labor of fruit gathering in an 

 orchard of five hundred trees which bloom and sets annually 

 fruit enough for 1,000 to 1,500 bushels. 



They never strike or go on a spree, or get inattentive to 

 business. Who can say it is not a success? An unfortunate 

 point in this combination is that the trees are all Duchess of 

 Oldenburg, which always bears a crop, thus precluding the 

 possibility of starving them. There remains but two ways 

 of working a change. All the fruit could be hand-picked 

 and destroyed as soon as formed, this would cost lots of 

 labor, which would doubtless be fully paid by the following 

 season's crop. A June frost hard enough to destroy the last 

 apple would be a quicker way, requiring us to be on the good 

 side of the clerk of the weather, and bringing us into disfa- 

 vor with everybody else, either would starve the bugs, which 

 seems to me the only remedy. 



Full cousin to these are the plum curculios, quite as per- 

 sistent and destructive and much more generally dissemi- 

 nated, more sluggish in habits and from the limited amount 

 of plums cultivated more readily destroyed by jarring them 

 from the trees onto white cloths and killing them. Another 



