The Cottony Maple Scale. 245 



writer was sent out for the purpose of fighting the scale at Broken 

 Bow, he found the trees to be literally alive with the pest, not one 

 being free from their attack, excepting only those which were so nearly 

 killed the preceding summer as to be unable to furnish sustenance 

 for them. 



These insects, like the other members of the scale family, obtain 

 their nourishment by sucking the juices from their host plant, through 

 a beak-like mouth, with which they pierce the tender twigs and under 

 sides of leaves. It is in thus appropriating to their own use the sap 

 which was intended for the development of the tree, that they are 

 capable of such destruction. The favorite food plants of this scale, 

 as its popular name indicates, are the various species of maple, in- 

 cluding the box-older, which seems to be preferred to anything else 

 here in Nebraska. Mr. J. G. Sanders, of the U. S. Bureau of Entomology, 

 reports having found it on "47 different species of trees, shrubs and 

 vines, including various species of maple, oak, linden, elm, willow, 

 poplar, beech, hawthorn, sycamore, locust, hackberry, osage-orange, 

 mulberry, grape, poison-ivy, apple, pear, plum, peach, currant, goose- 

 berry, rose and Virginia creeper." In any single locality, however, 

 its food habits are not so varied, it usually confining its attack to 

 a single kind of tree, only a few scattering ones being found on dis- 

 similar plants. Thus at Broken Bow, although there were a great 

 many soft maples, elms and hackberries among the box-elders, the 

 former were not injured iu the least, and only rarely were the scales 

 found infesting them at all. At Albion the elm seemed to be the 

 favored host, and at Neligh also the insect seemed to confine its 

 attention to the above named tree, while at Kearney it found to be the 

 most injurious on the soft maple. 



The life history of this, as of other scale insects, is most interest- 

 ing, and one of the most unique in the whole insect group, owing to 

 the great diversity of development in the two sexes. The great white 

 -cottony masses which seem to spring suddenly into existence in the 

 month of May, and which give the insect its common name, are the egg- 

 sacs of the female, consisting of a mass of tangled waxy threads 

 which are secreted by a pair of spinnerets. Into this tangled mass the 

 eggs are placed in enormous numbers, from one thousand to two 

 thousand being deposited by a single female. These eggs hatch during 

 the months of June and July, and soon the infested plant is swarming 

 with the minute lice, which settle usually upon the under surface of 

 the leaves along the veins, and begin their destructive pumping of the 

 eap. In a short time they undergo a moult and begin to secrete 

 the wax on their dorsal surface, which forms the scale covering. The 

 difference in the two sexes now becomes apparent, the males remain- 



