THE goen-worm: remedies por its attack. 125 



Eemedies. 



Wherever this species occurs in hirge numbers, it seems to be prac- 

 ticable, by the use of the proper means employed in time, to prevent its 

 becoming very destructive. As in other injurious species which have 

 more than one annual brood, it is of the greatest importance that the 

 remedial measures should be directed against the insect at its earliest 

 appearance. 



Hand-picking. — Experience has shown that the " corn-worm " may 

 be controlled by collecting by hand the caterpillars of the first brood 

 and destroying them. Even within the "cotton-belt," in Georgia, 

 where it abounds, it has been found that when " the corn was carefully 

 * wormed ' on two or three plantations, the boll-worms did not make tiieir 

 appearance that season on the cotton, notwithstanding that on neigh- 

 boring plantations they committed great ravages." Their presence in 

 the stalks can readily be detected by the holes eaten into the leaves; 

 and later, when they have migrated to the ear, their hiding places are 

 shown by the eaten and blackened silk mingled with their excrementa. 

 If the husks of such ears be partly opened at the top, the worm may 

 be found and destroyed. 



Atlracfi)tg ly odor and drowning. — Another method which has 

 given excellent results, where the insects occur abundantly, is to at- 

 tract the moth when they are just from the pupa and before they have 

 deposited their eggs, to a mixture of molasses and vinegar. The odor 

 will draw them from quite a distance, and in their eagerness to feed 

 upon the sweet substance, they are caught in it and drowned. As this 

 method is equally serviceable for the capture of many of our injurious 

 night-flying species, we quote the experience of Col. Sorsby, of Geor- 

 gia, as given in the Patent Office Keport (Agriculture), for the year 

 1855 (p. 285): — 



" We procured eighteen common-sized dinner plates, into each of 

 which we put half a gill of vinegar and molasses, previously prepared 

 in the proportion of four parts of the former to one of the latter. 

 These plates were set on small stakes or poles driven into the ground 

 in the cotton field, one to about each three acres, and reaching a little 

 above the cotton plant, with a six-inch square board tacked on the top 

 to receive the plate. These arrangements were made in the evening 

 soon after the flies had made their appearance ; the next morning we 

 found eighteen to thirty-five moths to each plate. The experiment was 

 continued for five or six days, distributing the plates over the entire 

 field ; each day's success increasing [? decreasing], until the numbers 

 were reduced to two or three moths to each plate, when it was aban- 

 doned as being no longer worthy of the trouble. The crop that year 

 was very little injured by the boll-worm." 



