2l6 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



this time I have never seen a plum on that tree. That is the first 

 thing to come in the spring, the first thing to bloom. That confirms 

 both Mr. Richardson's and Mr. Lord's opinions ; I think they are 

 both right. 



THE WHITE PINE WEEVIL. 



PROF. F. L. WASHBURN, STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



My attention has been called to the deformities frequently met 

 with in some of our white pines. Now, as one looks at one of 

 these large trees and observes its misshapen appearance it is hard 

 to realize that this condition is due to the life activities of a ver 

 small insect, hardly more than one-quarter of an inch long. Just 

 as many other phenomena have their origin in some obscure cause, 

 so does this peculiar and, to the lumbermen, money-losing growth 

 owe its origin to what appears to the ordinary observer to be an 

 insignificant, almost microscopic beetle. 



This beetle, whose scientific name is Pissodes strobi, is one of 

 the weevils, or snout beetles, belonging to the family Curculionidac, 

 a group containing the weevils, numbering about 10,000 species, 

 and causing an estimated annual loss of $30,000,000 in the United 

 States alone. Why this weevil should, with what seems to be 

 malice aforethought, choose the growing tip of a young pine for 

 the home of its young, thereby practically spoiling what would have 

 produced several thousand feet of good lumber, when apparently 

 any one of the laterals would do equally well, 'is hard to understand, 

 but that such is the case can be easily proven by any observant 

 person going through the pine woods of Minnesota, New England 

 and elsewhere. It must be said, however, that the white pine is 

 not the only tree affected, since it is known to lay its eggs in spruce, 

 fir and hemlock, though it api'^rently does not deform these. 



Briefly, the life history of this foe to the lumberman is as fol- 

 lows : The mature female deposits her eggs in the spring in the 

 bark of the leading shoot of a small white pine, three to five feet 

 high, laying one in a place at irregular intervals along the shoot. 

 Fitch states that egg laying occurs in May in New York. The 

 larvse hatching from the eggs bore obliquely downward into the 

 wood and pitch, making but a short burrow, causing an exudation 

 of pitch and the dying of the shoot. Hence, a joint is made, and a 

 tree thus affected will not send out a new leader for, possibly, sev- 

 eral years. The laterals grow upward, each one striving for lead- 

 ership, as it were, and no one of them equalling what the leading- 

 shoot would have been had it not been destroyed. 



