﻿328 POMONA COLLEGE JOURNAL OF ENTOMOLOGY 



by the Commission of Parasitology for some years, up to the time, at least, 

 when Mr. Isaac was sent down to investigate conditions ; this fighting was 

 limited to Yautepec, although Cuernavaca is only a short distance away and 

 very badly infested ; since the time of Prof. Herrera and his commission, ef- 

 forts at combatting it have practically ceased. The Commission of Parasitology 

 has passed out of existence and its functions given over to the Central Agri- 

 cultural Experiment Station in Mexico City. A visit to this station soon 

 convinced me that very little concern was felt about the pest there. Further- 

 more a bulletin of this station issued in 1910, Bulletin 31 entitled Diseases and 

 Pests of the Orange, offers the following remedies, which are practically 

 identical with those given ten years earlier: "(1) Clean the orchards thor- 

 oughly, cutting out all weeds, and substitute hedges with wire fences. (2) 

 Gather daily the fallen fruit and burn it in incinerating ovens prepared for this 

 purpose. (3) Rake the ground beneath the trees to displace all pupae and 

 expose them for chickens to eat. (4) If there are successive crops of fruits 



Figure 123. 



Showing condition of the incinerating furnaces today. Evidently tliese have not 

 been used for a long time. 



attacked by the fly, such as the mango and guava, destroy one of these to break 

 the cycle of successive generations of the pest, since the female will have 

 nothing in which to deposit her eggs." It very often happens that a remedy 

 is used year after year against a certain pest or plant disease, so that, there- 

 fore, there is nothing amiss in the mere fact that these are identical to those 

 of ten years ago. The trouble lies in the fact that practically no attempt has 

 been made in the last three years, at least, either to study the trouble further 

 and possibly find more effective means for combatting it, or even to enforce 

 those already proposed. I was informed of this fact by the chief of staff' at the 

 Central Experiment Station, Sr. Jose Ramirez. (Eig. 123). 



In addition to these artificial means of fighting the dread fly, there has 

 been another agency at work for many years. A parasitic ichneumon fly 

 has been known for some time to favor the larv?e of this fly as a place in which 



