﻿OF THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 101 



also prefer to get into such positions to undergo their different molts. 

 Their power for injury increases with their growth. At first de- 

 vouring the vegetation in particular fields and patches in the vicinity 

 of their birth-places, they gradually widen the area of their devasta- 

 tion, until at last they devour every green thing over extensive dis- 

 tricts. Whenever they have thus devastated a country they are 

 forced to feed upon one another, and perish in immense numbers from 

 debility and starvation. Whenever timber is accessible they collect 

 in it, and after cleaning out the underbrush, feed upon the dead leaves 

 and bark. A few succeed in climbing up into the rougher-barked 

 trees, where they feed upon the foliage, and it is amusing to see with 

 what avidity the famished individuals below scramble for any fallen 

 3eaf that the more fortunate mounted ones may chance to sever. This 

 increase in destructiveness continues until the bulk of the locusts 

 have undergone their larval molts and attained the pupa state. The 

 pupa, being brighter colored, with more orange than the larva, the in- 

 sects now look, as they congregate, like swarms of bees. From this 

 time on they begin to decrease in numbers, though retaining their 

 ravenous propensities. They die rapidly from disease and from the 

 attacks of natural enemies, while a large number fall a prey, while in 

 the helpless condition of molting, to the cannibalistic proclivities of 

 their own kind. Those that acquire wings rise in the air during the 

 warmer parts of the day and wend their way as far as the wind will 

 permit toward their native home in the northwest. They mostly 

 carry with them the germs of disease or are parasitized, and wherever 

 they settle do comparatively little damage. 



DIRECTIOXS IN WHICH THE YOUNG LOCUSTS TRAVEL. 



The young insects move, as a rule, during the warmer hours 

 of the day only, feeding, if hungry, by the way, but generally march- 

 ing in a given direction until toward evening. They travel in schools 

 or armies, in no particular direction, but purely in search of food — 

 the same school often pursuing a different course one day to that pur- 

 sued the day previous. On this point the experience of last Spring is 

 conclusive; and while the bulk of the testimony as to their actions, 

 when hatching out in States further north and west, is to the effect 

 that the prevailing direction taken is south or southeast, the prevail- 

 inff direction taken last Spring, in Missouri, as gathered from the re- 

 ports of numerous correspondents, was northward, sometimes a little 

 to the east, at others to the west. I have, while traveling along a 

 road, often seen them marching in one direction to the left and in the 

 opposite direction to the right of me. They were more often noticed 



