430 



was found last year, as we have already shown in the pages of Insect Life, damag- 

 ing plums iu Texas. The present spring, as reported by Mr. F. E. Cunningham, it 

 has been found puncturing half-grown peaches in the neighborhood of Brunswick, 

 Ga. The normal food of this insect, as we have elsewhere shown, is a large thistle. 

 Upon this plant it breeds, and when it occurs in injurious numbers in an orchard 

 search should always be made for the normal food-plant, which should thereafter be 

 watched and the young bugs destroyed by spraying with kerosene emulsion. 



Mauritian Sugar-cane Coccidee. — Miss Ornierod sends us some specimens of Coc- 

 cidn' from the Oriental Estates Company iu Mauritius. One proves to be the original 

 Icerya sacchari of Signoret (synonym of Icerija scycheUarum Westwood), the species 

 which Dr. leery reported as serioui^ly damaging sugar-cane in Mauritius many years 

 ago. On the lands of the Oriental Estates Company it occurred upon guava and not 

 upon sugar-cane. Upon sugar-cane, however, was found another coccid, which 

 proves to be a species, probably new, of the genus Westwoodia. This latter insect 

 lives upon the roots of sugar-cane, and does serious damage. Is it possible that in 

 the different handlings between Mauritius and Washington the labels have become 

 changed and that the Westwoodia belongs on the guava and the Icerya on sugar-cane? 



Leaf-beetle Injury to Orchard and Nut Trees in Florida. — A little leaf-beetle, 

 Metachronia laridum 01., related to the strawberry root-borers, has this spring been 

 reported from two localities in western Florida as injurious to nut and fruit-bearing 

 trees. Mr. A. Faye, of Faye, Walton County, reported injury to pecan trees, a grove 

 of several hundred trees being all more or less blackened, as if blighted. Mr. S. S. 

 Harvey, of Quintette, Escambia County, reported damage last year to chestnut, on 

 the young sprouts and bloom. The present year, before the chestnuts put out leaves, 

 they began on the buds of pear, cutting the stems of many leaves. They also did 

 considerable damage to the fruit of early peaches, to the apricot, Japan walnut, and 

 pecan. One entire grove of pecans was affected. 



A destructive Scale Insect new to the United States. — Our agent, Mr. Town- 

 send, at Brownsville, Tes., has just found a mealy bug new to the United States in 

 DactyJopius virgatus, said by Mr. Cockerell to be the most pestilential of Jamaican 

 Coccidit. Mr. Townsend found it upon "Jacobo" cactus. In Jamaica the species 

 is nearly omnivorous and cotton is one of its food-plants. 



Further Damage by Cryptorhynchus lapathi. — Mr. E. V. Wilcox, of Cambridge, 

 Mass., sent to this division during June specimens of the large curculionid, Cryptor- 

 Jiyncltus lapathi, in the larval and beetle states, with the statement that the larvie 

 were present in large numbers in certain willows in that locality. The larva, our 

 correspondent states, bores between the bark and the wood, the burrow being made 

 in the growing wood and bark, usually in an horizontal plane about the stem and 

 branches. 



Spread of another imported Snout-beetle. — The same correspondent sent with 

 the bark and wood infested with Cryptorhynchus lapathi a single specimen of an 

 imported otiorhyuchid beetle, Barypithes (Exomias) peUucidus Boh. The former 

 species, as we announced in the last number of Insect Life (p. 360), has recently been 

 recognized iu the suburbs of Boston, but the latter has not hitherto been found out- 

 side of the neighborhood of New York City, where it was first taken in 1886. B. 

 peUuddns is said to l)e very common in the environs of Paris, France, at the base of 

 the cultivated strawberry. 



