INSECT AND OTHER ENEMIES, 



CHAPTER XL 



It is a peculiarity of all cultivated crops that when grown 

 abundantly over a wide district of country, they become 

 infested with many diseases and are attacked by a large num- 

 ber of insect and other enemies. The more useful the plant, 

 the greater the variety and number of its foes. It may there- 

 fore be reasonably expected that whenever the culture of 

 clover becomes established in any state or section and is in 

 such high favor with farmers that a large acreage is in culti- 

 vation, insect enemies will appear, increase and multiply. 



Prof. J. A. Lintner, in the Report of the New York Agri- 

 cultural Society 1881-2, page 190, gives a list of no less than 

 seventy-one species of insects in Europe which infest the 

 clover plant. In the same volume, pages 192 and 206, he 

 gives the names of some sixty species that have been known to 

 attack clover in America, and some eight or ten other species 

 have since been discovered by other entomologists. A recent 

 bulletin of the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station gives 

 the names of eighty-two that have been discovered up to 1885. 

 It will thus be seen that the clovers have as many enemies as 

 a saint. Many of these species are not peculiar enemies of 

 clover, as, for instance, the grasshoppers and various butter- 

 flies, and, hence, will not be discussed here, while others do 

 comparatively little damage. We confine our attention main- 

 ly to those peculiar to the clover, which have infested the 

 clover fields in some parts of the country, and may in all. 



One of the minor pests is the clover leaf midge, (an illus- 

 tration of which is presented on the following page) 

 which deposits its eggs in the folded leaf of the white clover^ 



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