REMEDIES. 285 



destroy strawberries by the acre. More often, certain 

 patches of a field or garden are infested, and sometimes will 

 be kept bare of plants in spite of all one can do. Too 

 often, the presence of the grub is learned only after the 

 mischief is complete. You may have petted a strawberry 

 plant for a year, and after it has developed into noble pro- 

 portions, and awakened the best expectations from its load 

 of immature fruit, you will, perhaps, find it wilting some 

 morning. You then learn, for the first time, that this insidi- 

 ous enemy has been at work for days, and that not a root 

 is left. An inch or two beneath the dying plant, the grub 

 lies gorged and quiet in the early morning ; but if undis- 

 turbed it soon seeks the next-best plant it can find, and it 

 is so voracious that it is hard to compute the number it can 

 destroy throughout the long season in which it works. 



Having made its full growth in the spring of the third 

 year, this grub passes into the chrysalis state, and in May or 

 June comes out a perfect insect or beetle. It is '^ one, two, 

 three, and out." 



While there are beetles every year, there is, in every lo- 

 cality, a special crop every third year; in other words, if 

 we observe beetles in great numbers during the coming May 

 and June, we may expect them again in like quantities three 

 years after; and every second year from such superabun- 

 dance they will be very destructive in all those fields through- 

 out the locality wherein the eggs were laid. 



REMEDIES. 



When once our soil is full of them, scarcely any remedy 

 is possible that year. Surface applications that would kill 

 the grubs would also kill the plants. Where they are few 

 and scattering, they can be dug out and killed. Sometimes 



