﻿44 SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT 



harbors dozens or even hundreds of bugs, will suffer from eating them 

 — the symptoms described being a falling off in flesh and constipation. 

 Verhutn sat sapienti. 



PROGNOSTICATING. 



After such a Chinch Bug season as we had in 1874, the question is 

 continually asked during the Winter: ''Will there be any chinch 

 bugs next Rummer ? " It is impossible to give any satisfactory answer 

 to such a question, because so much depends on the character of the 

 approaching Spring. We had some very severe and continued cold 

 weather this Winter, and many entertain the hope that the chinches 

 have been frozen out. The farmer must lay no such unction to the 

 soul, however; for it is not intense cold but changeable Winter 

 weather — successive thawings and freezings — that injures and destroys 

 the Chinch Bug.* 



UNXECESSARY FEARS. 



While some thus take a bright view often unwarranted by the 

 actual facts, others again are unnecessarily pissimistic and hopeless of 

 the future prospects — borrowing trouble where there is, perhaps, no 

 cause for it. This fact may be illustrated by the following letter from 

 Mr. Wm. H. Avery, of Lamar, Barton county, as a sample : 



About a month or six weeks ago, numerous farmers of this county reported flnd- 

 ing large quantities of dead chinch bugs on the ground beneath shocks of corn. They 

 were so numerous that double handfuls could be taken up without much effort, and 

 many believed that all the bugs in the country were dead. One man said that he had 

 observed that what appeared to be dead bugs were only the shells or outer covering 

 of bugs, and he believed the bug itself had only escaped troni its old covering. 



i liave not heard of any living chinch bugs being seen for two or three months, 

 though I have not made particular search. 



P. S. Since writing the foregoing, Dr. Dunn and I have made search in the fields 

 for living chinch bugs and could find none, while dead ones are abundant. 



1 send you, in another wrapper, a piece of corn-stalk containing the bugs just as 

 we found them. 



Now in the corn-stalk sent, though, on a superficial view, it 

 appeared black with chinches, there was not a single living bug to be 

 found. What had been mistaken for them was a mass of the empty 

 pupa-skins. We have seen, in speaking of the insect's transformations, 

 how, at each successive molt, the colors of the perfect bug are more 

 and more approached, until in the pupa state, both in color and size, 

 there is great resemblance to the mature bug. When about to un- 

 dergo the last molt, i. e., to shed the pupa-skin, the insects in late 



* Since this was written, I have found the Chinch Bug by millions in its Winter quarters, and oa 

 the 28th and 29th of March— the weather being quite warm— they already began to move and fly about. 

 This shows tbat the long and severe Winter had little effect on them. ■* 



