April, '12] BALL: DRIVING &PRAY 147 



THE EFFICIENCY OF THE DRIVING SPRAY 



Bj' E. D. Ball, Utah Experiment Station, Logan, Utah 



Five years ago the writer presented to this society a paper setting 

 forth the methods used and a summary of the results obtained with 

 the driving spray. This paper was neither comparative nor contro- 

 versial. It set forth one method only and gave the results obtained 

 through a series of years. Its aim was to acquaint the entomological 

 workers with a method found to be highly efficient in the West and to 

 leave it to their own good judgment as to the possibilities of adapting 

 it to their own conditions. 



Since that time, a great deal of work has been done on the subject, 

 both East and West, and a number of papers have been published. 

 It was, however, very unfortunate for the popularity of the driving 

 spray that the second contribution to the subject should have been 

 critical in manner, over enthusiastic in its claims, and founded upon 

 results obtained under exceptionally favorable conditions. 



Little wonder, then, that the further literature of the subject con- 

 tained articles both controversial and severely critical of the driving 

 spray. The writer's sympathy was, however, with the later writers, 

 even when they included his own work in the criticisms. Besides 

 antagonizing other workers, the "one spray and one pound of poison" 

 slogan misled many fruit growers in the West with a resultant severe 

 financial loss. Just how much of this loss was due to the original 

 publication and how much to the arsenical poisoning propaganda, 

 the meteoric career of which nearly coincided with and for the time 

 being enhanced the popularity of this fallacious dogma, no one can 

 tell. Certain it is that the combination resulted in financial disaster 

 to the fruit growers in many of the western localities in which it was 

 accepted. Let us hope that the good done in stimulating other and 

 more accurate workers to added efforts may, in the end, counter- 

 balance the injury thus inflicted on an important industry. 



After the above declarations and considering the time that has 

 elapsed, the author hopes that he may be allowed to present some 

 further results obtained by use of the driving spray without thereby 

 becoming associated in your minds with some of the extravagant claims 

 that have been made for this method. 



In the previous paper, the writer showed that the continuous use 

 of the driving spray has reduced the number of worms per tree in the 

 Smart orchard each year below that of the previous one until they 

 were so few in number that it was impossible to use the orchard for 

 further experimental work. A search was then made for a commercial 



