372 ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW- YORK 



CHERRY. LEAVES. 



penetrates the ground sufficiently to awaken it into activity. It 

 then breaks from its prison and works its way out of the ground. 

 These beetles begin to make their appearance each year about the 

 first of May, and become most numerous in the middle of that month. 

 They are sluggish, inactive, and seemingly stupid in their move- 

 ments. They repose during the day time, hid in the grass, or any 

 other covert which they find. At dusk they awake and fly about 

 slowly, and with a humming noise, hitting among the leaves of 

 the trees and clinging thereto, and feeding upon them. They are 

 most fond of the leaves of the cherry and plum, which trees they 

 every year injui-e more or less, and occasionally they congregate 

 in such numbers as to wholly strip them of their foliage, destroy- 

 ing all hopes of any fruit from them that season. An instance 

 of this kind was communicated to me four years since by Milo 

 Ingalsbe, Esq., of South Hartford, at that time President of the 

 Agricultural Society of this (Washington) county. He had 

 seventy plum trees and a number of cherry trees of the choicest 

 varieties, which never gave faii-er promise of an abundant yield 

 of fruit than at that time. But a swarm of these May beetles 

 suddenly gathered upon the trees, many of them being then splen- 

 didly in bloom, and in two nights, the 15th and 16th of May, 

 wholly stripped them of their foliage, so that many of them were 

 as naked as in winter. With their humming notes, these beetles 

 were flying about the trees every evening until about ten o'clock, 

 when they would settle in clusters of eight, ten, twenty or more, 

 and would thus remain until daylight, when they would tumble 

 down from the trees, flying but little, however, and hiding them- 

 selves wherever convenient to stay through the day. These obser- 

 vations are important, showing that between midnight and day- 

 light is the best time for spreading sheets beneath the trees to shake 

 and beat these insects into them. In a subsequent letter, dated 

 June 29th, Mr. I. stated that these beetles had then disappeared 

 from all his trees except an Ox-heart cherry, on which about a 

 dozen were found, this being the choicest variety among his cherry 

 trees — indicating that though seemingly such st»pid creatures, 

 they are good connoiseurs in selecting their food. And among 

 his plums, it was the Washington, Jeiferson, Lawrence and others 

 of his best kinds which had been attacked with the greatest avidity. 



