ORCHARDS AND FRUIT CULTURE. 75 



now top. You must consider that you are about to ruin the old 

 top, for the sake of getting a new and better one. You can 

 hardly pass through the country anywhere without seeing this 

 mistake made in grafting. 



To enter a little more into detail in regard to the borer. The 

 hole which we see in the tree, from an inch to two feet from the 

 ground, in the Spring, is that from which the bug — I will call him 

 a bug, because we shall all understand that — comes out in the 

 latter part of May or early in June. Within two or three weeks, 

 the female lays her eggs and they hatch in July. The eggs are 

 laid in two rows of four eggs each, and one at each end. They 

 are always placed in that position. You seldom see the borer. 

 The first year they simply bore through the bark. You will find 

 at the foot of the tree the reddish castings which they throw out, 

 and if you examine closely enough you have only to cut through 

 with your jack-knife, without wounding the wood or the tree in 

 the least, hardly cutting through the outer bark, and you may kill 

 eight out of ten of the borers. They lodge themselves between 

 the wood and the bark the next winter, and the following spring 

 they commence their most destructive work. They set at work 

 with their auger and bore upwards, and if they are not taken out 

 as early as June or July, they Will have got so far that it is of 

 little use to follow them. Before that time, you may dig them out 

 with your knife very easily. I sometimes use a wire and fre- 

 quently a spear of grass will kill them, but after July you had 

 better not undertake to cut them out ; you will damage the tree 

 more than the borer will. I prefer to fight this insect by exter- 

 mination rather than by attempting to put on anything repulsive, 

 for the reason that if he is once killed, he is gone, but if you drive 

 him from one tree he goes to another. If he does not attack the 

 apple-tree, he will attack your mountain ash or thorn tree. The 

 second year, after having completed his growth, he bores up the 

 trunk. There the chrysalis is formed and lies through the winter, 

 and the next spring it comes out. The first year, and the early 

 part of the second year, are the proper times to fight them. If 

 any one understands the habits of the insect, it is easy to take care 

 of it. 



The most shameful sight I ever saw in an orchard was in 

 Massachusetts. I counted twenty-five or thirty nests of the tent 

 caterpillar in a single tree in the old State of Massachusetts, and 

 every tree had more or less on it. Now it is one of the simplest 



