72 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



entering the slit permits the placing of the machine directly 

 under the vine. It then remains for the operator to jar the 

 insects off. Mr Barden found that it required several shakings 

 to dislodge all the beetles. In one case he succeeded in catch- 

 ing 64 by jarring a vine once. It was found advantageous to 

 have three machines operating together and placed simultane- 

 ously under adjacent vines. This arrangement facilitated the 

 work very greatly and reduced to a minimum the beetles jarred 

 from vines before a machine could be placed under them. 



This method appealed so strongly to Mr Hough, who by the 

 way is a very practical business man, that he used it daily for 

 a time on certain badly infested vines and found that in the 

 case of those jarred twice, he did not get over three or four 

 .beetles to a vine, whereas at the first operation 40 to 50 were 

 secured and 15 or 20 at the second jarring. An examination 

 in this vineyard July 24 showed that the beetles were not nearly 

 so abundant as two weeks before, probably largely due to the 

 four collectings in the two weeks. 



The principal difficulty with the present machine is the 

 relatively large amount of time consumed in placing it under a 

 vine and shaking it two or three times. It would seem possible 

 to devise a practical machine which, while it might not collect 

 as many beetles at any one operation, would catch a consider- 

 able number while being dragged, carried or pushed between 

 the vines. This would prevent the delay incident to stopping 

 at every vine, and permit so much more rapid work that a con- 

 siderable sacrifice in the proportion of beetles captured would 

 be permissible. It would probably require less than one quarter 

 of the time to collect with such a machine, and it is hoped some 

 mechanic will be ingenious enough to make some practical 

 device. The period of about seven days existing between the 

 appearance of the earliest beetles and oviposition would allow 

 considerable collecting before any eggs were deposited. 



The late Prof. C. V. Riley, in his report for 1868, calls atten- 

 tion to the fact that one man whose vineyards were very badly 

 infested by this insect had trained his chickens to go between 

 the vines and pick up the beetles as they were dislodged by 



