No general list of their food plants has ever been prepared and 
nothing whatever is known of preferences with respect to food among 
the different species of grubs. That they may live for a considerable 
period on earth alone is shown by Dr. Riley, who says that he has 
known the larve of the common May beetle to feed for three months 
upon nothing but pure soil;* and Professor Perkins, of Vermont, has 
kept individuals of all ages alive for weeks, and sometimes for months, 
in sand more free from organic matter than the soil of any field fit for 
growing crops.| The remarkable fact that the grubs may eat locust 
eggs in the ground has been mentioned in the First Report of the U. 8. 
Entomological Commission (p. 305). 
The beetles of the white grub feed most frequently on the leaves of 
various species of trees. Oak, hickory, ash, box-elder, elm, chestnut, 
butternut, black walnut, basswood, hackberry, hazel, willow, black lo- 
cust, mountain ash, tame and wild cherry, and pear are the species posi- 
tively known by us, by personal observation, to be eaten by the adult 
beetles of various species; and apple, plum, Lombardy poplar, sweet 
gum (Liquidambar), maple, and birch may be added to the list on other 
authority. When a tree is much infested, the leaves are eaten entire 
except perhaps a stub of the petiole, or the petiole and a part of the 
midrib. Even the bark of the younger twigs may be gnawed away. Two 
species, hirticula and fusca, have been charged with an almost wanton 
injury to the foliage of trees (oak and chestnut) done by gnawing 
through the leaf petioles without eating the leaves (Proc. Ent. Soc., 
Washington, Vol. IT., p. 59), and we have noted the same habit as occa- 
sionally exhibited to some small extent in the “artificial forest” on the 
University premises at Champaign. The imagos sometimes eat the 
leaves of blue-grass also, and we have once found them feeding on 
heads of clover and once on corn. Several species have been known to 
eat the leaves of raspberries (“Insect Life,” Vol. I., p. 366). 
Concerning the food of the separate species, we have only notes 
on the preferences of L. inversa, L. hirticula, and L. fusca. In our 
breeding cages we learned that adults of L. inversa would feed upon the 
blades of blue-grass, at least when nothing else was available, and that, 
supplied with leaves from a variety of trees, they ate freely of oak, elm, 
and chestnut, and slightly of hazel, but neglected ash. L. hirticula also 
ate blue-grass in our breeding cages under similar circumstances, and 
devoured chestnut very freely, but at first did not touch ash or oak. 
Later it ate elm, oak, and chestnut greedily, hazel and hickory sparingly, 
and birch not at all. Oak and chestnut leaves seem, on the whole, to be 
the favorite food of this species. LL. fusca, similarly fed, also ate oak 
and chestnut greedily, and ash and elm less freely. A single species 
(L. rubiginosa) has been reported to eat “New Jersey tea” (Ceanothus 
americanus) in Kansas. 
These notes on the food of the beetles are of interest because of the 
damage sometimes done by these insects, especially to trees on- lawns, dur- 
ing the brief period of their excessive abundance in May and June, but 
still more because it is in the adult stage that the white grubs are most 
" * St. Louis “Globe-Demoerat,” March 25, 1876. 
; Fifth Ann. Rep. Vermont Agr. Exper. Station (1891), p. 151. 
< Proc. Ent. Soc. of Washington, Vol. II., p. 244. 
