414 



ARTICULATES : INSECTS. 



Fig. 303- 



Hessian Fly, C. destructor, 

 Say. 



the tawny base, and fringed with short hairs. The hind 

 body is tawny, with black on each 

 ring, and clothed with fine grayish 

 hairs ; legs brownish and feet black. 

 Two broods of this fly appear in a 

 year, one in spring and one in au- 

 tumn. The females lay their eggs 

 on the young blades of wheat, both 

 in spring and fall. The eggs are 

 about one fiftieth of an inch in length, 

 four thousandths of an inch in diame- 

 ter, cylindrical, translucent, and pale 

 red, and hatch in about four days, 

 producing pale red maggots. The larvae immediately 

 crawl down the leaf, and work their way between the 

 latter and the main stalk, till they come to a joint. Here 

 they rest a little below the surface of the ground, with 

 the head downwards, and do not move from the place till 

 they have undergone their transformations. They injure 

 the plant, not by eating it or boring into it, but by suck- 

 ing its sap ; and when several are fixed upon one stem, 

 the plant becomes exhausted, and withers. The larvae 

 come to their full size in five or six weeks, and are then 

 three twentieths of an inch long, and covered with a 

 hardening brown or chestnut-colored skin, and the insect 

 is then said to be in the flax-seed state, so called from its 

 resemblance to a flax-seed. In April and May they com- 

 plete their transformations, and come forth in the winged 

 state, and soon begin to lay their eggs upon the spring 

 wheat, and upon, that sown the autumn before. The 

 maggots hatched from these eggs pass down the stem as 

 before stated, take the flax-seed form in June or July, and 

 in autumn most of them are transformed into winged in- 

 sects ; but others remain through the winter, and are 

 transformed in the spring, as observed above. These 



