126 



THE PRACTICAL ENTOMOLOGIST, 



ANSWEKS TO COKEESPONDENTS, 



BY B. D. WALSH. M, A.— Assooiatk Ei.itor. 



W. H. B. Lykins, Kansas. — I can add nothing to what 

 I have already said rospoeting the Borers of the Peach 

 and of the Locust in No. 4 of the Phactical Entomolo- 

 gist (pp. 27 — 29). The fact of the Locust Borer having 

 already in 1S65 travelled as far westward as Lawrence, 

 Kansas, is very interesting. You say that " many of your 

 farmers are digging up their Locust trees, believing that 

 they are the cause of the Peach trees being infested with 

 Borers." They might as well kill off their sheep, believ- 

 ing that rats and mice are generated on the sly in the 

 night time by the old ewes. Tell them to put that non- 

 sense out of their heads. The small thread-like white 

 larva;, which, were "taken out of a mass of hard frozen 

 gum last March," from a Peach tree infested by Borers, 

 are the larvse of a t\to-wiuged fly which preys on decay- 

 ing vegetable matter, and probably of some species of 

 the genus Ortalis. As you may notice, they have no 

 legs at all; while the larva of the true Peach Borer has 

 always sixteen legs, no matter how young it may be. 

 Your specimens reached me in first-rate order, 



C. P. Wickersham, Penna. — Thanks to your good pack- 

 ing, the larvffi of the Wheat Midge, "taken from the 

 screenings of wheat after passing through the thrashing 

 machine," arrived in excellent order. You say that 

 about one-half the wheat crop has been destroyed in 

 your neighborhood in 1SG6 by this insect. This agrees 

 with what I hear from other quarters, not only in Penn- 

 sylvania, but in Maryland. Many of the specimens sent 

 are enveloped in what you and Dr. Harris consider as the 

 "skin" of the insect undergoing the process of being 

 moulted, but what I and all European authors consider 

 as its cocoon. The real truth of the matter is, that if you 

 wound or break this "skin" or "cocoon" — call it which 

 you will — the enclosed larvse will often crawl out of it; 

 otherwise not. That this is really so, you or any other 

 man can easily satisfy himself by experiment. Hence 

 it follows that Harris must be in error here. If you refer 

 again to Harris's book, you will see that his theory was 

 based, not upon observations made personally by himself, 

 bub upon facts reported to him by a very estimable lady, 

 who, however, never pretended to any knowledge of En- 

 tomology. I have discussed this whole sul)ject very ful- 

 ly in the Proceedings, Ac; (III. pp. 568 — 570;) but this is 

 not the proper place for controversy. 



Marion Hobart, 111. — The black cricket you send is a 

 male of our common Acheta abhreviaia in the pupa state. 

 In the perfect state the wing-cases are as long again, and 

 the insect is larger. The female may be readily distin- 

 guished, cither in the pupa or perfect state, by having a 

 long bristle-shaped ovipositor projecting behind. Forone 

 of these crickets that you find in houses, you will find a. 

 thousand in the woods and fields. Our true American 

 house-cricket is of a dull clay-yellow color, and does not 

 occur to the north of Maryland. All the crickets feed in- 

 discriminately both on animal and vegetable substances. 

 I have repeatedly noticed ahbreviata under dead putrid 

 birds, Ac. Even the Catydids sometimes eat insects; for 

 I have caught several species with flies in their mouths, 

 which they were munching up. Closet-naturalists, copy- 

 ing from one another's books and scarcely ever opening 

 the Great Book of Nature, usually tell us that all the Or- 

 thoptera, except the family of the Camel-crickets {Man- 

 t(da'), are exclusively vegetable feeders. But even the 

 Grasshoppers, which are the most so, have been known 

 in Minnesota, where they are sometimes so numerous as 

 to do great damage, to eat woollen clothes ofl" the fences. 



The light green insect, which you say you found feed- 

 ing upon plant-lice, is the male of CEcanthus niveus, or the 

 tree-cricket. Both this and the proceeding belong to the 

 Acheta family of the Order Orthoptera. The larva is 

 shaped like the perfect insect, but has only the merest 

 rudiments of wings, and when first hatched out none at 

 all. The fact of this insect feeding on plant-lice is new 

 and important. The males make a loud shrilling noise 

 in the night and often fly into houses, but are too noisy 

 to be agreeable inmates in a bedchamber. 



E. Gridley, Lake Co., 111. — The insect "found feeding 

 greedily on your potato-vines" is the larva of the terrible 

 New Potato-bug, respecting which see my Article in No. 

 1 of the Practical Estosiologist. 



L. W. Taylor, N. Y. — The slender, long-legged insect, 

 about three inches long, which you send is the Spec- 

 tnimfemoratum of Say, a female. The male is of a shining 

 pale mahogany color and has a forceps at the tip of its 

 tail. It belongs to the Phasma family in the Order Or- 

 thoptera, and 13 remarkable for never acquiring wings, 

 or even any rudiments of wings, in either sex. There are 

 foreign species which have wings, and which have the 

 legs expanded so as to resemble leaves, whence they have 

 been called " Walking-leaves;" and some old authors ac- 

 tually believed that the leaves of trees changed into these 

 insects, and then dropped oft' and commenced walking 

 about. Our species is sometimes called in English "Walk- 

 ing-stick" and sometimes "Prairie alligator," which is a 

 poor name for it, because it lives in the woods and not on 

 the Prairie, feeding on the leaves of the trees it inhabits. 

 It is perfectly harmless and may be handled without 

 fear, I have handled thousands of them, and never kn6w 

 one even attempt to bite, as Grasshoppers will sometimes 

 do. 



H. B. Beegle. N. J. — \.%t. The bunch of eggs on the twigs 

 of your apple-trees is that of the common "Caterpillar" 

 of the Api)le-tree, {Climocampa americana). Respecting 

 these Bee the Answer to Marion Hobart in No. 10 of the 

 Practical Entomologist, p. 101. For every one of these - 

 that you destroy, you destroy a future "caterpillar" nest. 

 2nd. The smooth chrysalis about an inch long, suspend- 

 ed by its tail to the apple-tree twigs, and with a curious 

 projection like a large roman nose on the middle of its 

 back, is the pupa of Limcnitis Ursula, a large and hand- 

 some butterfly of a blue-black color, with orange spots, 

 but without any tail to its wings. The books say that its 

 larva feeds on willow, cranberry and cherry. I have 

 bred it from plum, and now you find it on apple. The 

 larva is mostly olive-green with two sprangiiug horns 

 behind its head. 3rrf. The oval larvEe, 'i inch long, with 

 thick-setevenly-shorn short hairs, white when youngand, 

 brown when full-grown, belong to Lagoa opercularis — a 

 cream-colored moth with the basal portion of its front 

 wings covered with curly wool, which is marked more or 

 less with rusty black. It is a very variable species, and 

 Dr. Packard has described a variety of it bred from the 

 blackberry as Lagoa crispata. I have bred it from the Sy- 

 camore or Buttouwood, and Dr. Fitch enumerates it as 

 among the insects found on the plum. Your finding it 

 on the apple is apparently a new fact. It is a very rare 

 insect in Illinois, and I believe generally so. The moth 

 will not appear till next summer, and the larva makes a 

 tough oval silken cocoon, which it attaches to r twig of 

 the tree on which it feeds. If you find any of these on 

 your trees, please send them all to me, even if there are 

 a score of them, cutting off" a small piece of the twig 

 along with each. 



"Walter Riddell, Canada West. — The small red mites, 

 about the size of the head of a pin, which you find at- 

 tached in great numbers to the wings of grasshoppers, 

 have long been known to me; but, so far as 1 am aware, 

 they have never been named or described. They are al- 

 lied to the genus Uropoda, a species of which attaches it- 

 self by the tail to the bodies of certain dung-beetles in 

 Europe, but difi"er in attaching themselves, not by the 

 tail but by the head, and in the front pair of legs being 

 not only exceedingly small, but so small that 1 cannot 

 distinguish them at all, so that the animal is apparently 

 six-legged, like a true louse. Yet the general characters 

 are those of the Mites. Most mites, indeed, when in 

 the larva or immature state, have only six legs; but all 

 that I have examined of your species are apparently in 

 the perfect state. Not improbably it may belong to 

 Latreille's genus Astofna, a European species of which 

 is said to be parasitic upon Flies and other insects, and 

 which has only six legs. In that case it may be called 

 Astoma iocustanim, as it is distinct from the European 

 species by the body not being at all constricted in the 

 middle. I have never found more than eighteen or twen- 

 ty of them on one grasshopper, and do not believe that 

 twice that number would have any material effect on the 

 health of the insect. The grasshopper you send is the 

 common Ked-legged grasshopper — Calopicniis fcmur-rv,- 

 brum. A species differing from this, only in the wings 

 and wing-cases being always a great deal longer than the 

 body, and named .npreius by Mr. Uhler, is the insect that 

 does 80 much damage in Colorado and probably also iu 

 Minnesota. 



^^^^Several Answers lay over for the next number. 



