INDIANA HORTICULTUEAL SOCIETY. 299 



to infested fruit. You have there a specimen of infested fruit in that little 

 vial. A gxeat deal has been said about the danger from that fruit. We 

 have never been able to trace an introduction bacls to infested fruit. We 

 tried some experiments last year in this way to see what we could do. I 

 don't want you to take them as conclusive, but I will tell you what we 

 did and the results. Early last October we took very badly infested 

 apples, pears and plums and we placed them directly about the trunks of 

 fruit trees, putting the infested fruit on the ground and heaping them up a 

 little— not exactly heaping them up, but putting them directly about the 

 trees. In other cases we took peelings of apples and pears and twined 

 them around the trunks of trees. We thought what we got out of that 

 ought to mean something, but up to the present time— it is now nearly 

 a year— we have not found a single scale on one of those trees. I do 

 not want to be understood as saying that infestation can not come from 

 infested fruit, but I want to show how difficult it would be for us to 

 do that. 



President Hobbs: Why is that so difficult? 



There are a great many things I do not know, and that is one of 

 them; but I do know we did not succeed in that case. And I do know this, 

 that it spreads in various ways. We wanted to study this scale in the 

 insectary on trees we had planted there, and we wanted to get just exactly 

 those conditions, and we had a collection of limbs badly infected with the 

 scale brought to us, and we fastened them onto those trees with a wire, 

 and I worked for two years before I could get those scales introduced in 

 that way. I do not know why. We are terribly bungling with some things 

 and other things work very easily. You will understand there was no 

 wind there whatever and they must simply crawl from the limb of the 

 tree to the tree, which they did not want to do. They would fasten down 

 to the drying up bark of the section that had been introduced, before they 

 would crawl off on the tree. We did finally get them introduced in 

 that way. 



Now as to the way this, is introduced into orchards and the way it 

 is carried over the country: When one of my inspectors (we have ten or 

 fifteen of them) finds a little of this scale on a tree, he knows then, just 

 as well as if he had seen it, that there Is an infested orchard somewhere 

 in the neighborhood. The work is dropped right there and he goes hunt- 

 ing for the place it came from. The first thing we do on going to an old 

 orchard is to look under old birds' nests, and I will explain, why we do It 

 a little later. If one complaining of this insect in his orchard will tell me 

 what side of the orchard his infested tree is on, I can tell him pretty nearly 

 what the result will be. It makes all the difference in the world on which 

 side of the orchard it is introduced or makes its appearance. If it is on 

 the north side at the outer edge, or on the east side, it will spread com- 

 paratively slow. I am now speaking of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois; that is. 



