230 HALF HOURS WITH E^SECTS. [Packard. 



Dr. Fitch says that "young thrifty-growing pines are its 

 favorite resort, and among these it selects those that are 

 most vigorous, and whose topmost shoot has made the great- 

 est advance the preceding year. But I have seen it so nu- 

 merous that not only the topmost shoots of every tree in the 

 grove, but many of the lateral ones also were invaded and 

 destroyed by it. * * * The tree that is attacked con- 

 tinues its growth upward during the fore part of the season 

 as usual, sending out from the summit of the shoot that is 

 infested a leading shoot with a number of lateral branches 

 around its base. But the growth of these new succulent 

 twigs is arrested and they begin to wilt and wither about the 

 middle of July, the worms having by this time become so 

 large, and mined and wounded the stalk below to such an 

 extent that its juices are exhausted, and it fails to transmit 

 any nourishment to these tender green shoots at the summit, 

 which consequently dry up and perish." 



Here again the forester is aided by his best ft-iends, the 

 birds, which pick out the grubs and eat them. There are 

 also several parasitic insects which further reduce their 

 ranks. 



Another pine weevil, equally abundant and often as de- 

 structive, is the Hylobius. It is a larger beetle, and darker, 

 less reddish than the white pine weevil {Pissodes strobi). It 

 is particularly destructive to the pitch pine, so much so in 

 the southei'n states that Wilson, the ornithologist, thus 

 speaks of its depredations near Charleston, South Carolina, 

 as quoted by Harris. "Would it be believed that the larvifi 

 of an insect, or %, no larger than a grain of rice, should 

 silently, and in one season, destroy some thousand acres of 

 pine-trees, many of them from two to three feet in diameter, 

 and a hundred and fifty feet high? Yet whoever passes 

 along the high road from Georgetown to Charleston, in 

 South Carolina, about twenty miles from the former place, 

 can have striking and melancholy proofs of the fact. In 



6 



