102 



THE PRACTICAL ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Bev. Jas. B. Fisher, N. Y. — You send about a dozen 

 blackish maggots, i inch long and with the head end ta- 

 pered to a point, which you say were found attached by 

 their mouths to the body of a half-fledged young swallow, 

 most of them to the head of the bird, much as a tick is 

 attached to the body of a sheep, but not so firmly but 

 what you could pull them off. They arrived in excellent 

 order and form now a very interesting and valuable ad- 

 dition to my collection. 



I have carefully examined these larvae and they belong, 

 I think, undoubtedly to the (Estrus family — a family of 

 two-winged flies which includes the fly that produces the 

 Head-maggot of the sheep — the fly which makes what 

 are called "wormals" (worm-holes) in the hides of 

 Cattle — another fly as large as a large Humble-bee and 

 very like one, which lays two or three eggs on the neck 

 of the rabbit, whence proceed maggots nearly as large as 

 a man's thumb burrowing in the flesh and causing alarge 

 tumor on the aflected part, from which maggots I have 

 myself bred the perfect fly (Cutercbra cuniculi) — another 

 fly nearly as large, (the Cutercbra emasculator o( Fitch) 

 which lays its eggs in the scrotum of squirrels, so that 

 the larva hatchingout therefrom finally mutilates them 

 and produces the phenomenon of emasculation in a state 

 of nature, which imaginative hunters had accounted for 

 by supposing that the old male squirrels mutilated the 

 young ones — and finally the well-known Bot-fly of the 

 Horse. Nay, even the sacred body of man is not free 

 from the attacks of these insects; for there is authentic 

 evidence that a species exists in South America which 

 makes "wormals" in the human flesh. But in all these 

 cases, and also in the case of all other known insects be- 

 longing to the (Estrus family, the larva resides some- 

 where inside the body of the infested animal and that 

 animal is always a mammal, or properly speaking a Quad- 

 ruped ; whereas in the remarkable case recorded by you 

 the larva is attached externally to the body of the infest- 

 ed animal, and that animal is, not a mammal, but a 

 bird. 



All larvse belonging to this family, as soon as they are 

 full-fed, extricate themselves from the animal they in- 

 fest and go underground to pass into the pupa state, not 

 emerging into the perfect fly state till the following sea- 

 son. It would be very desirable, in case you meet with 

 another swallow infested by these larvae, to attempt to 

 breed the perfect fly from them. For this purpose the 

 bird should be placed in a large jar half full of moist 

 earth and kept alive by feeding it with flies. After the 

 parasites have retired underground, the earth in the jar 

 should be kept moist by covering it with damp moss or 

 damp dead leaves, moistened afresh every few weeks j 

 and m the following spring the mouth of the jar should 

 be covered with musketo-bar to prevent the flies escaping 

 uncaught. Most probably these flies will belong to a 

 new and hitherto undescribed genus, which, if you should 

 succeed in rearing them, will be very appropriately 

 named "Fisheria." If you send some to me, I think I 

 can promise you that much. 



You observe upon the strangeness of so large a parasite 

 infesting so small an animal. There is a small wingless 

 parasite, about the size of the hea-d of an ordinary pin, 

 which infests many kinds of beetles, especially dung- 

 beetles, and of which I once counted no less than seven 

 all gathered upon the body of a single small fungus- 

 beetle, not much over J inch long — the Triplax thoracica 

 of Say. This is as if a grown man had seven lice crawling 

 over his person, each louse as large as a full-grown 

 turkey. 



James Barratt, Mass. — The oval, pale brown, smooth, 

 silken cocoons, about one-fourth inch long, which you 

 send, were spun by the larvae or worms, which, as you 

 say, were found by thousands ujion two American Black 

 Spruce trees, eating all the leaves off them. They will 

 produce four-winged Flies belonging to the Family of 

 Saw-flies {Tcntkredinida:), so called from the females hav- 

 ing a pair of saws at the tij) of her abdomen, which she 

 uses to cut slits in the leaves wherein to deposit her eggs. 

 Most probably your species is the Lophyrus abietis of 

 Harris, which has long been known to operate upon fir- 

 trees in Massachusetts in the manner you describe. The 

 male fly is black and the female pale brown, so that you 

 would scarcely think tiiey belonged to the same species. 

 You will find figures of each in Harris's book on Injuri- 

 ous Insects, Plate viii, figs. 3 and 5. The best way to get 



rid of them is to shake the larvje or worms off the tree 

 upon a sheet, and then either burn or scald them or feed 

 them out to chickens, turkeys or hogs. Of course if they 

 are allowed to increase and multiply without check either 

 from man or from some cannibal or parasitic insect, they 

 will destroy the trees upon which they feed. 



And now, Mr. Barratt, let me give you a scolding. 

 You sent indeed great plenty of cocoons, and for that I 

 thank you; but you sent them loose in your letter, so 

 that almost all of them were squeezed as flat as a pancake 

 before they reached me. Now in this region we have no 

 Lophyrufi, because we have scarcely any pines and firs ; 

 and I therefore should have been glad to rear specimens 

 of the perfect fly from your cocoons, which now I shall 

 probably be unable to do. Another time always enclose 

 specimens in a little pasteboard bo.x, filling up any va- 

 cant space with cotton-wool or some such matter. 



Arthur 0. Brickman, Maryland. — It is quite impossible 

 to tell what insect it was that stungyou. The symjitoms 

 in your case were certainly very severe and unusual, but 

 I believe that this was owing to some peculiarities in your 

 habit of body at the time, rather than to any peculiarity 

 in the nature of the insect — if it was an insect and not a 

 spider — that stung you. The stini; of a honey-bee is or- 

 dinarily not very severe in its efiects ; but I know of cases 

 where persons stung by honey-bees have died in conse- 

 quence. When I was a boy I was often stung by bees 

 and humbh^-bces W'itbout suffering much therefrom; bu( 

 on one particular occasion, being stung in the lip by a 

 humble-bee, my whole body was in five minutes covered 

 by lumps like a violent nettle-rash, and in an hour's 

 time my face swelled up so that I could not see out of my 

 eyes. I recollect well that this attack lasted for three 

 days and was finally subdued — after trying various other 

 remedies — by poultices of an English herb called " fever- 

 few." I am generally stung now two or three times every 

 year, as I catch many stinging insects fearlessly with my 

 bare fingers; but I always tind, that if I suck the wound- 

 ed part for ten or fifteen minutes, the consequences pass 

 ofi' in a short time. 



Geo. E. Brackett, Maine. — The shining mahogany-co- 

 lored bunches, of an irregularly hemispherical shape and 

 about one-fourth inch in diameter, attached in masses to 

 blackberry stems and each of them when lifted up dis- 

 closing an enormousnumber of minute pale pinkish eggs, 

 are the dead bodies of a bark-louse. A species which can- 

 not be distinguished from this, so far as the dead body 

 of the mother bark-louse is concerned, infests the grape- 

 vine, and was named by Dr. Fitch Lccanium vitia and 

 supposed to be identical with a species that infests the 

 grape-vine in Europe. I also received from 0. B. Douglas 

 of Vermont exactly similar specimens found on the plum, 

 as noticed in the "Answers" in No. 9, p. 89. I had thought 

 at first that the species found on the plum might be dis- 

 tinguished from that found on the grape-vine by the 

 color of the eggs ; but it seems probable that the imma- 

 ture eggs are always white, and that as they approach 

 the time when the included young bark-louse is almost 

 ready for hatching, its pinkish or reddish color shows 

 through the delicate shell of the egg. Still it is not im- 

 probable, that when the males of all these bark-lice are 

 bred, they may prove to be distinct species. This has not 

 yet been done with any of our N. A. Lecanium. Great 

 numbers of your eggs hatched out on the road, and there 

 were also in the box two minute Chalcidians, which had 

 no doubt been parasitic in one of the eggs, remarkable 

 for having a bright yellow scutel. I know but one other 

 Chalcidiau that has such a yellow scutel. 



Dr. Wm. Manlius Smith, N. Y. — The "elongated eggs" 

 you find in the pith of dead sum.ach twigs I know to be 

 those of some species of the Catydid family, probably be- 

 longing to the genus Orchelimum or Xiphuhttm. See on 

 this matter my Papers in the Proceedings 111, pp. 232 — 3 

 and 5S1. There was no living thing in the specimens 

 sent except these eggs. 



The Practical Entomologist, now near the close of its 

 first year of publication, desires to know if its friends 

 will sustain it another year to the extent of 5000 subscri- 

 bers at 60 cents each. .It ought to have 600,000, even at 

 a dollar. Tliere is not a farmer in the United States who 

 could not derive great benefit from reading it. Some 

 single hint on the destruction of some troublesome insect 

 might save the subscriber many times the cost of the pa- 

 per. — Weekly New Hampshire Advertiser. 



