INSECTS INJURIOUS TO THE STRAWBERRY. 
INTRODUCTORY. 
The strawberry is now, perhaps, the most popular fruit in the 
State, certainly eaten by more people, and probably in greater 
quantities, than any other perishable fruit. The greater part of this 
importance it has acquired within a very few years, largely as a 
consequence of devices for the rapid transportation of such fruits 
and their preservation in transit in good condition for delivery at 
markets many hundreds of miles from the place of production. This 
has had the result not only to multiply many times the area over 
which the individual fruit grower could distribute his strawberries, 
but greatly to extend the season during which this fruit could be 
had at reasonable prices in the principal markets of the State. 
Now that shipments of strawberries are regularly made from the 
southern sea coast to New York City, and from Central Mississippi 
to Chicago, the fruit being cultivated as a specialty by a rapidly 
increasing number, on farms from fifty to one hundred and fifty 
acres, the insect enemies of this crop have acquired an economic 
importance very different from that which they had when the com- 
mercial demand for strawberries was supplied chiefly from the sur- 
plus of the family garden. As might be expected, also, the great 
increase in the area devoted to this fruit, and the growing dispo- 
sition to cultivate it in large tracts instead of in isolated patches, 
have noticeably stimulated the multiplication of such insects as 
found their natural food in the wild strawberry of this region, and 
seem also to have attracted the attention and invited the attack of 
other species which originally depended for food upon other plants. 
Forty species of insects are now known to attack the strawberry 
with more or less injurious effect, besides one millipede and one 
mite not properly to be classed as insects. All the seven insect 
orders are represented by them, except the Neuroptera, and to the 
latter very few insects injurious to man belong. Four of the forty 
are Hymenoptera (a mason bee, an ant and two saw-flies) ; thirteen are 
larve of Lepidoptera, all belonging to four families of moths; one 
is a dipterous insect (a gall-fly), and fourteen are Coleoptera, repre- 
senting the five families, Scarabeide, Llateride, Chrysomelide, 
Curculionide and Otiorhynchide. The two Orthoptera are both 
grasshoppers, and the eight Hemiptera include a scale insect, three 
plant lice, and four Heteroptera. 
