Timely Hints for Farmers. 



WINTER REMEDIES FOR INJURIOUS INSECTS. 

 No. 9, February i. 



It is not altogether easy to realize that all the different kinds 

 of insects which were seen flying and crawling about during the 

 summer, are still in existence, in one form or another, during the 

 winter. What was then a moth or a butterfly may now be an 

 ^gg, fastened to the twig of a tree, or a worm under the bark, or a 

 pupa in the ground. The beetles, which were then running across 

 the path, may now be hidden away in some hole. The bees, then 

 so busy on the flowers, are now deep in their subterranean tunnels. 

 The grasshoppers exist as eggs in little pockets in the soil. And 

 so, whatever may have happened to the "individuals" of the sum- 

 mer time, the "species" are still with us, quiescent but alive, and 

 ready to appear again with the warm weather. 



Though our enemies the insect pests may be quiet at this 

 season of the year, it is no reason why we should be. They got 

 ahead of us, perhaps, during the summer; now is our chance to 

 get even. Many of them are now at their lowest ebb, and one 

 Individual killed now is worth many deaths later on. 



For example, take the plant-bugs; the squash-bug or the false 

 chinch-bug. One winter day I brought in an armful of wood for 

 the stove. Immediately after, I noticed a peculiar pear-like odor, 

 which suggested that some one had been buying candy flavored 

 with that coal-tar product which is supposed to taste like pears. 

 No candy being discoverable, I turned to the wood-box, to find 

 many healthy-looking individuals of the common squash-bug. It 

 was these creatures, which had come in with the wood, that had 

 produced the peculiar odor. The female squash-bug lives during 

 the winter under piles of wood, boards, and such things, and by 

 placing suitable shelter about the garden can be trapped and killed. 

 Each female so dealt with would have been the mother of a lively 

 brood later on. 



At L,as Cruces, one winter, I was turning over the dead leaves 

 and trash which had gathered along the garden fence. This de- 

 bris was found to be swarming with little greyish bugs, the false 

 chinch-bug or Nysius angustatus. Eater on, in the spring time, 

 these bugs were found in myriads in a strawberry patch not far 



