1 84 NATURE STUDY AND LIFE 



are numerous about the cellar, keep the windows closed or 

 screened, so that the moths cannot escape to the apples 

 outside. Make an excursion to a neighboring orchard and 

 search the trees over. Look especially for bark scales 

 that have been pecked into by woodpeckers. You will 

 find numbers of these if there are any of the birds about, 

 and by lifting the scale you will find the empty cocoon. 

 If all the cocoons are not thus empty, you do not have 

 woodpeckers enough to take care of the trees. Have any 

 of the children observed woodpeckers at work on the trees 

 during the winter ? Did they save the bark scales from 

 which they saw them pecking the larvae? These bark 

 scales tell a story as interesting as apples, birds, and 

 insects all combined, and one or two should find a place 

 in every school collection of the codling moth. 



Later in May and early in June the dark-gray moths 

 will be emerging in numbers in the vivarium. Fig. 76 

 shows them, natural size, and it will be noticed that they 

 have a little horseshoe of bright copper-colored scales on 

 the front wing. This will serve easily to distinguish the 

 codling moth from the other innumerable little gray mil- 

 lers of about the same size. Shortly after the moths 

 begin to emerge in numbers in the locality look for the 

 eggs, flat oval scales about one millimeter in diameter, 

 laid commonly (in the spring) on the young apples a week 

 to ten days after the petals have fallen. Most observers 

 speak of beginning to find them about the time when the 

 apples have grown to be an inch in diameter. 1 This is 



1 The eggs are commonly stated to be laid in the calyx of the apple, but 

 all recent observations prove that those who started this story had not seen 

 the egg, but reasoned from the fact that the larva eats its way into the 



