376 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



LOCUSTS AND GKASSHOPPERS* 



Owing to favorable seasons last year and this for grasshoppers and 

 locusts, they have been very numerous and made their work felt on various 

 plants — celery being one of the number. Those celery fields that have 

 been surrounded mostly by high meadows, grain fields, forest or pasture 

 lends, have suffered the most severely. It is on the drier, more sandy land 

 that they are the most numerous early in the season, and then, as vegeta- 

 tion in these places becomes dry and partly dead, they avail themselves of 

 the fresh and green fields of celery in the low lands. They will never be 

 found on the low lands in numbers except in dry weather when they are 

 driven from the uplands by a scarcity of food. The eggs are laid on sandy 

 knolls or the mellower parts of the uplands, and here the young hatch and 

 attain considerable of their growth before they travel any distance. 



If the fields where the hoppers breed could be plowed and thoroughly 

 rolled in the fall, and kept under cultivation the following season, the 

 hoppers would probably be considerably reduced in numbers. The roller 

 is especially important as it is found that rolling crushes so many of the 

 frail egg cases. 



THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE SPECIES. 



Fig. 1, The red-legged locust, Melano- Fig. 2. The two-striped locust, Melanoplus femo- 



plus femur-rubrum. (after Riley.) ratus. (after Riley.) 



The species most frequently found and found in the greatest numbers 

 was the common red-legged locust, Melanoplus femur-rubrum (Fig. 1). 

 While no special study of the species on celery was made, it was evident 

 that those common in meadow and pasture lands were proportionately 

 common in celery fields. They stripped the celery of its leaves along the 

 border as readily as that of any forage plant. Some of the species 

 besides the red-legged locust that were common are the two-striped locust, 

 Melanoplus femoratus (Fig. 2), and Dissosieria Carolina. Of the common 

 meadow grasshoppers, Orchelimum vulgare, Xiphidiumfasciatum and X. 

 strictum, and the katydid, Scudderia furciilata (?) were plentiful. 



REMEDIES. 



A very good preventive, in one instance at least, that came under my 

 observation while in one of the fields, was to leave a strip of land about 



* The term tocMS< is applied in its more restricted sense to the brown hoppers with short horn-like 

 antennae, or feelers, and grasshopper, to the green hoppers with long thread-like antennee, and will be so 

 used in this bulletin. 



