250 



PINE. 



Pme Sawfly. Ln]iJi;/rm pini, Curtis. 



Pine Sawfly, pupa, and larva, magnified. Pine-leaves injured by Sawfly. 



The caterpillars of this Sawfly cause great damage to Pines, 

 and especially to young Scotch Fir woods, by feeding on the 

 leaves. In some cases they scoop away the sides of the leaf, 

 leaving only the midrib ; in others, beginning at the tip, they 

 eat the leaves almost down to the sheath. They also feed on 

 the bark of the young shoots, and, as they have voracious 

 appetites and appear in companies, the mischief they do is 

 enormous, and, unless checked by treatment or weather, is 

 continued year after year by successive generations over large 

 areas, sometimes extending to two thousand acres or more of 

 plantation. 



The Sawflies appear early in summer, when the female 

 inserts her eggs in the Pine leaves by cutting a slit along a 

 leaf with her saw-like ovipositor and laying a few eggs in the 

 opening, which she covers with a resinous material scraped 

 from the leaves, repeating the operation until all the eggs have 

 been laid. The caterpillars hatch in about three weeks, and, 

 like others of the genus Lopliyrus, are 22-footed. They have 

 a pair of claw-like feet on each of the three segments imme- 

 diately behind the head, the next segment is footless ; the 

 succeeding seven segments have each a pair of sucker-feet (or 

 "prolegs"), and the tail is also furnished with a pair, known 

 as the " caudal proleg." The colour varies much with age, 

 health, and weather ; at first the grub is green, paler or 

 whitish beneath, with a brownish yellow head, and black 

 sucker-feet ; when fall grown it has a rusty brown head, dark 

 forehead, and black jaws and eyes ; it has an interrupted 



