113 
Food Plants and Injuries. — White clover, alsike, red clover, and 
alfalfa are known to be eaten freely by this insect. In Europe 
another food plant is the grass Poa annua. Webster found a strong 
preference for white clover and alsike over red clover in Indiana. 
Osborn and Gossard found red clover to be eaten readily in Iowa. 
Here in Illinois red clover is commonly eaten, but white clover shows 
rather more of the injury. Alfalfa is also eaten to some extent. The 
beetles eat at the edges of the leaves, and the larvt'e feed at the roots 
or the bases of the stems. 
The leaves are bitten out in a characteristic manner, on acount of 
the methodical feeding habits of the beetle. On an expanded leaflet 
the beetle eats inward from the margin, making a small hemispherical 
or U-shaped gap. The symmetrical injury, shown in Figure 30, is, how- 
ever, frequent, as the beetle often, if not usually, selects a young 
tender leaflet that is still folded in halves along the midrib, and notches 
out both margins at once ; or it may bite out a hemispherical notch at 
the midrib, resulting in a round hole when the leaflet opens. When 
Fig. 30. — Leaves of white clover showing 
characteristic injury by beetle of Sitones 
Havescens. Natural size. 
all three of the folded leaflets are as 
yet side by side, the beetle at one 
operation produces the effect shown 
in the leaf at the left in Figure 30. 
A single notch constitutes a meal, 
whether the beetle happens to eat one 
thickness of the leaf or six. 
The youngest larvae work at the 
bases of the stems or the bases of the roots, tho most of the injury by 
them is done on the roots. A few of these larvfe, biting out the roots 
near the crown, can cause a plant to wilt, even tho no other insect is 
present. 
Aside from the serious injury done to white clover and the at- 
tacks upon alsike in Indiana in 1885, as reported by Webster, this 
species has not put itself on record as an injurious insect in this 
FXG. 31. 
-Sitones flanesceiis. Greatly 
enlarged. 
