THE MONTHLY BULLETIN. 143 



tatioii of an insect pest from another county, but also the distribution 

 of a pest from one district to another district within the county. To 

 do this certain quarantine regulations are enforced to prevent picking 

 boxes, ladders, sacks, orchard implements and other appliances from 

 being taken from an infested to a non-infested district, unless they have 

 been properly treated by fumigation, dipping or some other equally 

 effective means. 



It is often customary for a grower in one district to ship his fruit out 

 to another district for packing. This should never be allowed if the 

 fruit is grown in an infested district and shipped to a clean district, 

 but if grown in a clean district no objections could be found to shipping 

 fruit to a packing-house in an infested district, if no boxes are returned, 

 or if the picking boxes to be returned are first subjected to a fumigation 

 in an air-tight room, with a dosage of four ounces of potassium cyanide 

 per one hundred cubic feet of air space. Such a dosage will kill all life 

 and eliminate any possibility of carrying living mealy bugs or fertile 

 eggs with the boxes. In a district where a few of the orchards may 

 become infested seriously enough to endanger the rest of the orchards 

 within the district, the infested fruit is likely to distribute the mealy 

 bugs over the packing house. In such a case all th(^ picking boxes would 

 need to be fumigated before going back to the orchards to insure against 

 the mealy bugs crawling from the infested boxes to those going out to 

 clean orchards. The infe-station of the packing-house might be avoided 

 by dipping all of the infested fruit in the orchard, just before it goes 

 to the packing-house, in a concentrated solution of denatured alcohol, 

 allowing the fruit to remain five or ten minutes in the liquid. If pick- 

 ing boxes are to be taken to the packing-house the entire box might be 

 immersed, otherwise the fruit could be taken in clean shipping boxes. 

 This is to be particularly recommended where there is a severe infesta- 

 tion. If a few orchards are only slightly infested, so that the mealy 

 bug is rather difiticult to find, it does not seem to the writer that such 

 drastic measures are necessary, for the chances of distributing the pest 

 under such conditions are so slight as to make such rules seem too drastic. 



^o' 



Seed Bed and Nursery Stock. 



Great care should be taken to see that all seed bed and nursery stock 

 imported from any district where mealy bugs occur is perfectly clean 

 as this is one of the best ways of introducing the pest. Due to the diffi- 

 culty of exterminating the pest, infested stock from infested districts 

 is often not allowed to enter uninfested districts even though inspection 

 fails to reveal the presence of mealy bugs. 



