10 Oct., 1908.] I meet Pests in Foreign Lands. 587 



INSECT PESTS IN FOREIGN LANDS. 



Eighth Progress Report by Mk. W. W. Froggatt, F.L.S., F.E.S. 



R.M.S. Omrah. 



I reached Bombay on the 29th ^lay, 1908, and at once called upon the 

 Colonial Secretary, who gave me letters to the Acting Director of Agricul- 

 ture at Poonah, to which place I went the following day. After getting 

 some information from him, I drove down to where the new Agricultural 

 College is being erected and met Dr. H. H. Munn, who after being scien- 

 tific adviser to the tea planters of Ceylon, has been appointed principal. 

 I returned the following night to Bombay, and an hour later took the night 

 mail to Calcutta to Waine Station, the nearest point to the Imperial Re- 

 .search Laboratories at Pusa, Bengal. On the road I received a telegram 

 from Mr. Howlett (second Imperial Entomologist) saying he would meet 

 me at Allahabad, where he was investigating fruit flies. I met him at the 

 junction at midnight, and we spent the next three days around Allahabad, 

 Cawnpore and Lucknow in orchards and melon fields. Then we parted 

 company, and I went north to Dehra Dun and Missorie to see Mr. Stebbing, 

 the Entomologist of the Indian Forestrv Department, but though I met 

 other officers of the Department, Mr. Stebbing was away on tour. I then 

 returned, travelled all Sunday night, and met Mr. Howlett at Mogul Seria 

 on Monday evening, and reached Pusa at six on the Tuesday morning. 



Here I spent five days working in the laboratories with Messrs. Lefroy 

 and Howlett, and collecting and breeding fruit flies in the peach orchard, 

 among the mango trees, and in the melon fields. On the i6th July, accom- 

 panied by Mr. Howlett, who has been specially sent out to Pusa to study 

 the habits of biting flies and diptera generally, I left for Calcutta, which 

 we reached on the following day, and spent the afternoon going through 

 the collections with the curator. Dr. Annandale. Leaving late the same 

 e\ening for Bangalore via Madras, which we reached early in the morning 

 of the 20th, the Director of Agriculture at ^ladras sent the entomological 

 assistant on his staff with us, and Mr. Ayer piroved a very useful guide and 

 interpreter to us while in the State of Mysore where we collected a great 

 number of fruit flies in all kinds of fruits. Though the season was prac- 

 tically over we obtained maggots on nearly aJl the fruit. 



Though in the course of their investigations on Northern India after 

 breeding out some thousands of fruit flies only three specimens of a parasite 

 have been bred, in Bangalore Mr. Aver finds at least three small braconid 

 wasp parasites in the fruit fly pupas that infest the guavas that ripen in 

 October and November, but at the same time he estimates them as only 

 reaching 12 per cent, of the flies, and has never obtained any parasites 

 from pupse taken from mangoes, oranges or peaches. 



All the nurser}'men agreed that all their guavas have been destroyed for 

 the last six years with fly maggot. I therefore hold out verv little hope of 

 this being an effective parasite in Australian orchards, if it cannot check the 

 ravages of the fruit fly in its native haunts, but if any of the Departments 

 of Agriculture interested want to obtain these parasites a number could be 

 obtained at a very small cost. 



I have enlisted the services of the Imperial Entomologist and his assist- 

 ants to take up the matter, and the Director of Agriculture for Madras will 

 lend his native assistants, who are trained entomologists, and if so instructed 

 would collect and forward, via Colombo, parasites and pupae this coming 

 season. 



