INSECTS INFESTING FRUIT TREES. 



THE APPLE. 



AFFECTING THE LEAVES. 



Consuming the leaves of apple and cherry trees in May, and forming large 

 cobweb-like nests in the forks of the limbs; black, hairy, caterpillars, 

 with white lines and along each side a row of blue spots; living 

 together in societies. 



The Common Apple-tree Caterpillar, or American - lackey moth, 

 Clisiocampa Americana, Harris. (Plate 3, fig. 3, the male; fig 4, 

 the female.) 



There is scarcely an insect in our country more universally 

 known than is the one which we are now to consider, when in 

 its larva state, it being the common caterpillar, whose cobweb 

 like nests are everywhere seen, in the month of May and the 

 fore part of June, upon apple and cherry trees. But, though 

 every person is so well acquainted with these caterpillars, there 

 is not one of our citizens who knows the moth or miller into 

 which they change; and those to whom I have shown this miller, 

 have generally expressed their disappointment at finding it so 

 small, so dull colored, and so little ornamented with spots or 

 marks, they having supposed from the size of the caterpillar, 

 and the colors with which it was variegated, that it produced a 

 much larger and more gay looking insect. 



This insect pertains to the Family Bombycid^:, or the thick, 

 hairy bodied moths of the Order Lepidoptera, the silk worm 

 (Bombyx Mori) being the type of this group. And the moth of 

 our apple-tree caterpillar in its size and general appearance has 

 much similarity to that of the silk worm, though differing from 

 it notably in its color, and also in some of the minute but im- 

 portant points in its structure, which cause it to rank in a dis- 



