354 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY [Vol. 5 



liking, immediately seeks the opening at the apex. At this time the 

 figs are hard and from a quarter to three-quarters of an inch in diameter 

 and the eye is closed by the overlapping scales. With her powerful 

 mandibles she sometimes is obliged to cut away a portion of one of them 

 to effect an entrance, but usually she is able to push her head in and 

 after a struggle of sometimes five minutes or more pushes her body 

 down the zigzag way to the interior of the fig, leaving her wings behind. 



While one wasp is probably sufficient to fertilize a fig, where they are 

 very abundant as at the Maslin orchard at Loomis, it is not unusual to 

 find a dozen or fifteen in one small fig and as many more in a struggling 

 mass trying to get in, often the cluster of wings radiating from the eye 

 like the plumes of a feather duster. If the caprifig from which the wasp 

 has issued has been hung in a Smyrna tree she enters a Smyrna fig 

 and then finds she made a mistake, as the flowers are of such shape that 

 she cannot oviposit in them, and after wandering about in a vain effort 

 to dispose of her eggs, in this way doing her useful work of fertilizing 

 the female flowers, in most cases crawls out. When the weather is 

 warm, say 90 to 100 degrees, the insects are very active and come out 

 of the caprifig with a rush. The writer has seen 40 come out in one 

 minute. The issue takes place almost entirely in the forenoon, except 

 a cold windy morning is succeeded by hot sun in the early afternoon, 

 then a considerable number come out. The movement depends much 

 upon the weather. During cool windj^ mornings very few issue, but 

 if the next morning is warm, calm and sunny a great rush occurs. 

 The w^asps continue to issue from a single fig for a week or ten clays 

 and from various trees for two to three weeks. After the females 

 have left the fig most of the males soon follow and being wingless 

 drop to the ground like the females from the Smyrna figs. 



Every Smyrna fig not entered by the Blastophaga dries up and falls 

 from the trees. The same is true of the caprifig. In a few clays the 

 caprified fig undergoes a remarkable change. It begins to increase 

 rapidly in size, becomes smooth by a lessened prominence of the ribs 

 and losing its pea green color, assumes a decidedly pruinose tinge, 

 this being true also of the caprifig. 



There are still obscure problems to be solved in connection with the 

 fructification of the fig and it would be gratifying if some of our skilled 

 cytologists could be interested. One such problem is to determine 

 why the first crop of certain figs reach an edible condition without cap- 

 rification, while the next one never matures without it. One of these 

 varieties is the white San Pedro and another is the Gentile, the first 

 crop of the latter, however, does not entirely fail without pollination, 

 but the crop is much increased by the application of the Blastophaga. 



Outlook for the Fig Industry. The outlook for the Smyrna fig 



