32 PAPERS ON CEREAL AND FORAGE INSECTS. 
It is very apparent that wheat has a decided effect on the presence 
of the chinch bugs, as indicated in the localities where the wheat was a 
failure this spring. 
The dry weather had its effect on the fungus, Sporotrichum globuli- 
ferum, and it has not occurred in the fields this season (1911). Only 
once has it been possible to secure it in the laboratory. Continued 
search has been made for it in all kinds of places, especially after the 
rains in May and in July, beyond which latter month this record does 
not extend. 
HIBERNATION. 
At the beginning of the investigation the advisability of getting 
rid of the chinch bugs before they entered the young wheat in the 
early spring was very evident, for when once they have reached 
there they are not readily accessible. This led to a series of observa- 
tions on their hibernating habits for the purpose of determining the 
places preferred by the bugs. 
The current belief that most of the bugs pass the winter beneath 
corn husks, among cornstalks, in fence rows, under boards and rails, 
in heaps of rubbish, in straw stacks, along hedgerows, and in fodder 
shocks is not borne out by investigations in Kansas and Oklahoma 
following a severe winter. When the bugs are very abundant, as 
they were in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma during the fall of 1909, 
a few may be found in any of these situations, especially in the early 
fall. The most of the bugs find their way to thick bunches of clump- 
forming grasses in waste places, in pastures and meadows, and along 
roadsides and railroad rights of way. During late fall and early 
winter great numbers of living bugs can be found in corn husks, 
fodder shocks, piles of kafir, cane, and in most any place covered with 
vegetation—even in alfalfa fields where they find no food. In the 
spring, however, very few living bugs but many dead ones can be 
found in such situations, indicating that most of them died there. 
They find much better protection in the thicker and more dense, 
than in the thinner grasses and under trash in open fields. ‘The bugs 
seem to prefer the thicker grasses, though they are quite often found 
in other situations, and after open winters, as the one of 1910-11, 
many living ones can be found under very thin protection. Many 
living chinch bugs were taken from trash collected in an alfalfa field 
and some were found in corn fodder and corn husks lying on the 
ground on February 24, 1911, at Wellington, Kans., though most of 
the chinch bugs are at this time in the thick bunches of sedge grass. 
The situation in southern Illinois for the spring of 1911 was quite 
similar to that in southern Kansas; there were abundant clumps of 
Andropogon along roadsides, in fields, and in woodlands, and more 
chinch bugs were found in these clumps of grasses than in trash, 
