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CHAPTER XX. 

 RHYNCHOPHORA {contuiiud)~-Fami\y SCOLYTIDAE (IPIDAE). 



{Bark-borers.) 



The Scolytidae, or bLirk-borers (so called because a number of the members 

 of the family bore through the bark to oviposit inside the tree) prob- 

 ably include some of the worst pests the forester has to cope with. And 

 the insects are all the more difficult to deal with owing to their small 

 size, an eighth of an inch or less being the length of many of these minute 

 beetles. The forester has therefore no chance of making an acquaintance 

 with this form of insect life in the easy manner in which he may learn to 

 distinguish the longicorn beetles. Occasional specimens do, it is true, 

 enter the bungalow at night, but it requires a certain knowledge of insects to 

 be able to pick out a bark-beetle on the wall or cloth from the variety of 

 minute forms which will be crawling about round him. And in India the 

 commoner forms of Scolytidae which are pests in the forests are mostly of 

 small size. Some years ago I submitted a small collection of Indian speci- 

 mens to Mr. Walter J. Blandford, known to many an Indian forester as 

 Lecturer in Entomology at Coopers Hill, and himself a great authority 

 on this family. Mr. Blandford's remark on the collection was that " it is 

 the most uninteresting, and contains a majority of the most obscure minute 

 forms, of any collection I have had sent to me." Our national collections m 

 the British Museum contained but few of the Indian forms now known to 

 be of considerable, sometimes of first-class, importance economically. In fact 

 many of these forms proved to be undescribed species, the presence of which 

 in India (or closelv allied species) was foreshadowed by the collections made 

 by Mr. George Lewis in Japan and described by Mr. Blandford in the 

 Transactions of the Entomological Society* 



The position of affairs in India having been recognized, a close study 

 of the family became an imperative necessity, if progress was to be made in 

 the protection of the forests from a grave source of danger, and this study 

 has been carried on unremittingly during the past twenty years. 



As we shall see, although these insects are not commonly met with on 

 the wing, they are easily found when the forester has learnt where to look 

 for them, and when this knowledge has been assimilated together with 

 the hfe history of the local individual bark-borer pest or pests, it should, 

 under ordinary circumstances, be quite feasible for the forester to keep 

 these insects within bounds. 



* Blandford, The Rhynchophorous Coleoptera of Japan. I'art iii. Scolytidae. Trans. 

 Enl. Soc. Lond. pt. i, 53 (i<S94). 



