PINE BORERS. 675 



bugs (Hemiptera) which gather on these trees are the representatives 

 of fifty-four species, of which twenty kinds are plant and bark lice. 



In his excellent works devoted to the insects of the maritime pine of 

 France, M. Edouard Ferris in the volume on beetles alone enumerates 

 about one hundred species which live at the expense of this single 

 species of pine. 



Of the pine insects which are described in the following pages per- 

 haps the Pine moth of Nantucket has occasioned locally the most direct 

 and perceptible injury ; but upon the whole the most insidious and 

 widely destructive kinds are the timber-borers, and of these the grub 

 or larva of Monohammus confusor, called in the Southern pine districts 

 " the sawyer," does the most damage. 



Next to this borer, the white pine weevil {Pissodes strobi) does most 

 injury to timber, since it deforms the trees, causing the growth of 

 gnarled, many-headed trees, which, were it not for their attacks, might 

 have grown into tall straight trees fitted to make masts or to be sawed 

 into the best lumber. 



Attention has been called to the longevity of these borers, which, as 

 beetles, may live for years in articles of furniture or timbers of houses, if 

 from some cause prevented from pairing and laying their eggs. It is 

 not outside of the range of possibilities that the timbers of bridges and 

 other structures may be weakened by the unseen mines or tunnels of 

 longicorn borers and of timber beetles. Mr. W. H. Harrington is respon- 

 sible for the following statement which bears on this point : 



A number of years ago, a train of passenger-cars crashed througli a high bridge, 

 built of timber and comparatively new, and many lives were lost. The accident was 

 caused by the rapid decay of the timber, and a celebrated entomologist on examining 

 them found that the exterior had been bored by myriads of these little beetles, and 

 "water filtering into their tunnels had rotted the wood." * 



AFFECTING THE ROOTS. 



1. The white grub. 



Lachtwsterna fusca Frohling. 



Order Coleoptera ; family Scarab^id^e. 



We have been told by Henry Gr. Russell, esq., that on his plantations 

 of evergreen trees at East Greenwich, R. I., the common white grub, 

 presumably the young of the May beetle, attacks the roots of seedling 

 larches, white pine, and Douglass' pine and has at times done them so 

 much injury that he has had to replant them four times. I am also 

 told by Prof. C. E. Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum at 

 Brookline, Mass., that this grub has at times attacked and killed his 

 youn^ larches and any delicately rooted plants, such as Azaleas. They 

 do the most injury in August, when they are large. In wet seasons 



'Transactions of the Ottawa Field Naturalists' Club, No. 2, p. 31, 1881. 



