738 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



Wisconsin. It crossed the Mississippi river into Illinois in 1864. 

 It was in Michigan and Indiana in 1867, Ohio in 1868, and Pennsyl- 

 vania in 1870. It moved eastward at the rate of about fifty miles a 

 year for a number of years, but later it traveled more rapidly. It is 

 reported to have reached the Atlantic coast about 1874, and Nova 

 Scotia about 1882. When it reached the Atlantic coast, it had travel- 

 ed 1,500 miles in sixteen years, and nearly a thousand miles more 

 the next eight years in its march to Nova Scotia. 



''These insects have great power of endurance. They will walk for 

 great distances in search of food and, by direct experiment, they are 

 known to have lived thirty days without food. In the spring, the 

 beetles appear along with the first growth of potatoes, and while they 

 devour some of the foliage of the potato plants, the damage is slight 

 as compared with the destruction caused by the larvae of the suc- 

 ceeding brood. These early beetles lay their eggs upon the leaves 

 of the jjotato. We may find the orange-colored eggs in masses, vary- 

 ing from a dozen to fifty, closely placed upon the under side of the 

 potato leaf. It is said that a single female may lay as many as one 

 thousand eggs in its lifetime. The eggs are sometimes found upon 

 leaves of grass, smartweedi, or other plants in the potato field. They 

 hatch about a week later into peculiar looking hunchbacked grubs 

 or larvae of a reddish color, with markings of black spots in double 

 rows on each side. The larvae walk to the tenderest part of the 

 plant and there feed very rapidly, increasing in size by successive 

 moults until they are full grown. The length of time in the larval 

 state is fifteen to twenty days, when they leave the plant and go into 

 the ground a few inches below the surface and there pupate in a 

 cell of earth. In about ten days later they emerge as perfect adults, 

 which go in search of the plants again to lay eggs. There are from 

 two to four annual broods in this country, varying with the latitude." 



EFFECTIVE REMEDIES. 



Any serious damage to a crop by this beetle is unnecessary. 

 The only possible exceptions to this rule are when the 

 beetles in the spring appear io vast numbers upon plants as they 

 are coming up, and when the beetles of the second brood cross from 

 the field of a careless farmer into one's own field. 



In the first instance, resort may be had to fliand-picking of the 

 field, if reasonably small. Attempts to poison are not to be ad- 

 vised on account of the tenderneS'S of the new plant foilage and 

 the hardiness of the old beetle. The most feasible plan is to have 

 the plants down in furrows, as they will be when the covering 

 has been made shallow, and theo to fill the furrows with loose soil. 

 This gives the plants time for gaining more vigor, and for some scat- 



