38 
appeared in great numbers and inflicted severe injury on the great 
seed farm of Northrup, Braslan & Co., of Minneapolis, Minn., at La 
Moure, Dak. This firm has nine hundred acres in beans alone at 
La Moure, and the loss which they sustained was quite serious. We 
advised the use of the old remedy of driving the beetles into wind- 
rows of straw which are then burned. 
ANTHOMYIA ANGUSTIFRONS A LIGNIVOROUS INSECT.—Late in the 
summer we received from Mr. John G. Jack, of Chateaugay Basin, Proy- 
ince of Quebec, Canada, specimens of a fly which he described as feeding 
in the larva state upon planted beans. Somewhat to our surprise the 
flies proved to belong to Anthomyia angustifrons, Meig., a species which 
we had described both in our Ninth Report on the Insects of Missouri 
and in the First Report of the United States Entomological Commission, 
as preying upon the egg pods of the Rocky Mountain Locust. This dis- 
crepancy in habit is so marked that we wrote to Mr. Jack for full par- 
ticulars and quote from his reply : 
“In answer to your inquiries about the bean-feeding habit of An- 
thomyta calopteni, 1 gladly give what notes I possess. I first noticed 
the larvee on June 25. We had planted a bushel of Golden Wax beans 
and a few of some other varieties on or about June 15. They had not 
come through the soil by the 25th, and on seratching away a little of 
the earth above the rows, I was surprised to find that, although the 
beans were well sprouted and some of them were near the surface, yet 
they had an unhealthy appearance, and onexamining the cotyledons and 
stems, I found them infested with maggots. They were in numbers of 
from one or two to twenty-five or more in a plant, and the interior of 
the bean and stalk was so eaten away in many instances that only a 
very thin wall remained. I collected a large number of the larvze and 
kept them until they had produced the flies. The larvee were collected 
on June 25, and on the 28th a good number had entered the ground to 
pupate, and on July 2 all of my specimens had pupated and I could 
not find a maggot in the field. On July 9 and 10 most of the imagines 
appeared. One-half of the field in which these larve were so abun- 
dant had been sown in buckwheat the year before, and the other half 
had a black currant plantation from which the old bushes had been re- 
moved. It was in that part of the field where the currant bashes had 
been that the Anthomyia larvee were most destructive. Certainly more 
than nine-tenths (90 per cent.) of the beans were completely destroyed 
and never grew sufficiently to reach the ground. On the other half of 
the field, where the buckwheat had been grown, very few of the beans 
were affected. They were all covered with a plow, with about three 
inches of soil. The soil is a sandy loam, and the rows ran north and 
south through both pieces of land, so that the difference caused by the 
attack of Anthomyia was very marked. In another field, on July 17, I 
found occasional beans that had not come through the ground, and in 
them I found several maggots which I think were of the same species, 
