Not Too Hot To Handle 63 



them away to carry out their depredations elsewhere. Thus, 

 stomach and contact poisons are of greater importance than 

 the other type. 



Let's go out into the garden for a few minutes and 

 watch the inseas at work on the potato plants, the cucumbers, 

 and the cabbage. If your garden is like the garden of most 

 green-thumb enthusiasts, you will have no difficulty in find- 

 ing portions of leaves, and even whole leaves, missing, where 

 yesterday all were intaa. Now step closer, but don't disturb 

 the handsomely-striped little beggar who is unconcernedly 

 going about his business. See how fast that hole in the leaf 

 gets bigger as he works around the edge? A little arsenic 

 would fix him. Let's dust a little or spray some over the 

 leaves of our once lovely potato plants. Then, when he and 

 his brothers and sisters take their next meal they will eat the 

 arsenic along with the leaves and get a fatal stomachache. 



But this black monster over here with the wide-spread- 

 ing antennas would have to be handled in a different man- 

 ner. Unlike his gaily-colored pal of the potato vines, he ob- 

 tains his meal by the soda-straw technique. That long gad- 

 get on the front of him is a tube which he sticks right through 

 the surface of the leaf in order to suck out the sap in the in- 

 terior. A stomach poison would be no good against him 

 for it would never reach his stomach. His feeding tube 

 would merely penetrate the film of poison on the leaf as he 

 searched for pay dirt lower down. In order to hasten the 

 end of this guy — literally a little sucker — we must use either 

 a respiratory poison or a contact poison. Let's try the lat- 

 ter — perhaps some rotenone. We'll spray some on the 

 leaves, and as our black friend wanders around looking for a 

 nice place to get a meal, his legs will pick up some of the 



