6 SECOND ANNUAL REPORT OF 



been disseminated among those who have to deal with them, or to 

 the more potent and unalterable workings of Nature. 



The Chinch Bug, which in the dry summer of 1868, committed 

 such ravages upon our grain crops in many portions of our State, and 

 especially in the southwest, was scarcely heard of in 1869, after the 

 copious rains which characterized the past summer commenced to 

 shower down. The Apple Worm, or Codling Moth has been alto- 

 gether less injurious than it was the year before, and in Adair, Bu- 

 chanan, Cooper, Callaway, Cass, Lewis and Polk counties, especially, 

 and probably all over the State, our orchards have been loaded with 

 fair fruit. This result was predicted by the writer, and may be at- 

 tributed principally to the scarcity of the insect, resulting from the 

 partial failure of the apple crop in 1868 ; but in some part to the im- 

 proved methods of fighting the foe. For, as in our civil strifes, we 

 introduce improvements in the machinery which is to slay the oppos- 

 ing armies, so in this progressive age, we believe in introducing ma- 

 chinery to battle with our liliputian insect hosts, whenever it is avail- 

 able. And the experience of the past year proves, that to destroy 

 this insect, old pieces of rumpled rag or carpet placed in the crotch 

 of a tree, are to be preferred to the hay-bands wrapped around it, be- 

 cause it requires altogether less time to place the rags in their place 

 than to fasten the hay-band ; and the worms which spin up in them 

 can be killed by wholesale, either by scalding the rags or by pressing 

 them through the wringer of a washing machine. 



Owing to the severe drouth of 1868, which was unfavorable to its 

 successful transformations, that dreaded foe of the fruit-grower, the 

 Plum Curculio, was scarce in the early part of the season, and our 

 plum and peach trees set a fuller crop than they had done before for 

 years ; but the subsequent moist weather was favorable to the under- 

 ground evolutions of this little pest, and the new brood appeared in 

 great numbers about the end of June and beginning of July, when 

 they did much damage to stone-fruit and some damage to pip-fruit 

 by the gougings which they made for food. As stated in an essay 

 read before the State meeting of our Illinois horticultural friends, I 

 have discovered a little cannibal in the shape of a minute yellow 

 species of Thrips, which destroys vast numbers of the " Little Turk's" 

 eggs ; and let us hope, that by attacking the Curculio in its most vul- 

 nerable point, this Thrlps may in the course of a few years reduce 

 the numbers of the Curculio, as the ladybirds have done with the 

 Colorado Potato-bug, or as the minute mite (Acarus mali) is known 

 to have done with the common Oyster-shell Bark-louse of the Apple. 

 The eggs of the Apple-tree Plant-louse (Aphis mali) which last win- 

 ter so thickly covered the twigs of the apple trees in many orchards, 

 hatched and produced a prodigious number of lice as soon as the 

 buds commenced to burst. In this immediate neighborhood they 

 were soon swept away, however, by their cannibal insect foes, and by 

 insectivorous birds, such as the warblers, etc. ; but a physiological 



