1916 ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 151 



amount of culls about offsetting the extra cost of packing, in some of tiie last 

 formed companies the cost of packing was charged on the number of barrels 

 delivered at the warehouse, so that the man who delivered 50 barrels which packed 

 out 40 paid only one-half as much as the man who delivered 100 barrels which 

 packed out 40, the culls still being confiscated. The companies that operated 

 under this' last system had no difficulty in persuading their members to spray. 

 When a man has to buy a barrel costing 26 cents for cull apples, pay 20 cents per 

 barrel for having them handled, and then have the apples confiscated, it is quite 

 easy to persuade him to spend 15 cents per barrel on spraying, and make shipping 

 apples of them. Where the last system is operating, spraying is increasing rapidly, 

 and the executive of the United Fruit Companies are gradually persuading the 

 subsidiary companies to change over to the last system, as they find it the very 

 strongest argument they can use in getting more spraying done. 



These three complete and far-reaching organizations, some of which are in 

 direct personal touch with almost every fruit grower in the valley, at least once a 

 month have, to use a military phrase, " to be kept in ammunition." We are carry- 

 ing on a number of experiments and observations to find out just what insects are 

 doing the most damage, the extent to which each can be profitably controlled, the 

 profits derived from controlling them; the actual cost of spraying; the best 

 nozzles to use and the best materials to use. In this work we have the co-oper- 

 ation of the Provincial Entomologist, Prof. W. H. Brittain, who has taken over the 

 investigations on the sucking insects of the apple, leaving the biting insects to the 

 Dominion Laboratory. We have demonstrated that in an ordinary orchard in 

 the Annapolis Valley, the benefit derived from controlling bud moth, fruit worms, 

 and Codling Moth will pay for the entire cost of spraying, at least twice over; in 

 addition the grower has his insurance against blackspot or scab free, and the mo-^t 

 progressive of the Nova Scotia growers are now realizing that they cannot operate 

 an orchard profitably in the Annapolis Valley without spraying. 



Newspaper Work. 



The Co-operative News, a paper conducted by the United Fruit Companies, 

 and mailed to every one of the members of the Companies, or about sixty per cent, 

 of the growers in the Annapolis Valley, twice a month, has reserved a page for any 

 articles" we may choose to write or solicit on spraying problems. By this means we 

 are able to publish timely articles, give advance notice of insect outbreaks and 

 methods of combatting them, as we will do with the Tussock Moth next season; 

 give the growers the benefit of our findings just as soon as we are sure of our results, 

 and have our papers and articles in handy .form for the use of our inspectors, in 

 carr}dng on their personal canvass for more and better spraying. 



The work in increasing the amount of spraying, we realize, is the most im- 

 portant part of the work of controlling Brown-tail in Nova Scotia, and a large 

 portion of the summer is devoted to spraying experiments and demonstrations, in 

 order that we may devise the most economical sprays possible for Nova Scotia, as 

 the cheaper and more effective the spray is, the more growers we can persuade to 



use it. 



Spraying to Control Bkown-tails in the Fall, 



For two years we have been working on the possibility of controlling Brown- 

 tails with the last summer spray, and this year we demonstrated that where arsenate 

 of lead is used with Lime Sulphur in the last summer spray, or that applied from 

 June 28th to July 15th, the poison will adhere to the leaves enough to poison the 

 young Brown-tails when they emerge from the egg and start feeding in August. 



