a 
were most numerous; but even then the quantity destroyed was scarce- 
ly sufficient to affect materially their average numbers. Mr. E. V. Wil- 
cox,* while studying the food of the robin, at the Ohio Agricultural Ex- — 
periment Station, found in the stomachs of twenty-seven of these birds, 
shot in April and May, Elateride amounting to three and one half per 
cent. of their.food. Of the remaining species of birds known to eat 
them, none take enough to make more than a fraction of one per cent. 
of their food, except, perhaps, the crow. Dr. Fitch says that “wire- 
worms and their progenitors, the snapping beetles, constitute the favorite 
food and principal sustenance of these birds [crows ].” + 
PREVENTION AND REMEDY. 
Probably no class of agricultural insects has had prescribed for it 
a longer list of artificial remedies than the wireworms, and certainly no 
such list has been of less practical value. After many generations of 
experience with their work in this country and in Europe their injuries 
continue at present practically unchecked by any treatment consistent 
with the methods of American agriculture. 
Even poisons of the most deadly sort applied to corn previous to 
planting, or to food lures distributed through the ground for the pur- 
pose of drawing off the attention of these imsects from corn, have proven 
almost entirely valueless, both in my experience and in the more elab-_ 
orate trials made by Comstock and Slingerland in New York. Late fall 
plowing, breaking open the pupal chambers within which the recently 
transformed adults pass the winter, will probably have the effect to di- 
minish generally the number of these beetles during the following year. 
.Comstock and Slingerland have also ascertained that the adult beetles — 
are susceptible to certain poisons judiciously distributed with certan at- 
tractive kinds of food; and I have to suggest a systematic rotation in- 
tended to interpose between grass and corn a crop not vulnerable to the 
wireworm. Otherwise we are substantially without a hint of any means 
of diminishing the ravages of these insects other than the time-honored 
resource of the corn farmer, namely, late planting of his corn the second 
year after sod, and late replanting if the’ first planting is destroyed. In 
the latter case it is well to plant between the rows, allowing the first 
corn to stand as long as is consistent with a proper cultivation of the field. 
All the wireworms being at the time concentrated in the old hills of corn, 
if these be destroyed when the field is planted the second time, the wire- 
worms still active in the earth are forced to attack the freshly planted 
kernels as their only food resource. 
The first experiments with poisons for the wireworms of which we 
have definite record, were made at my office in 1885, and reported briefly 
in my “Miscellaneous Essays on Economic Entomology” (p. 18), printed 
the following year. 
Later, in May, 1888, we fed thirty-seven wireworms on corn soaked 
for seven days in a mixture of water and Paris green. The corn was 
covered with a coating of the green poison, and was eaten freely by some 
of the worms without killing them. Twelve wireworms fed on corn 
* Bull. Ohio Agr. Exper. Station, No. 43, (1892), p. 127. 
+Bleventh Rep. (Trans. N. Y. State Agr. Soc., (1866), p. 542, 
