INSECTS AND BIRDS. 271 



wherever plant lice are present, and see if some lady-birds cannot 

 be found. The little red, two-spotted lady-bird has a red body with 

 a black spot on each side of the back. She is not as large as the head 

 of a lead pencil. Other lady-birds with red bodies and black spots 

 will also be found. The young larvae of these lady-birds, which have 

 long, spindle-shaped bodies, will also be found near, feeding upon 

 the plant lice. Watch them and see how they kill the plant lice. 



Search cabbage leaves or leaves of oat plants or other plants for 

 green lice and see if any can be found with round holes in their 

 backs. Such lice can nearly always be found on cabbage leaves. 

 Not all of them will have the holes in their backs, but many of 

 them will be found with their bodies round and apparently greatly 

 swollen. These will probably have the little parasites still inside 

 of their bodies. If such lice are brought into the room on a piece 

 of leaf and placed under a lamp chimney with a piece of muslin 

 over the top, the tiny, dark-colored, flylike parasites will soon cut 

 holes through the backs of the lice and come out in the chimney. 

 This would be very interesting to watch. 



SECTION XLIL INSECT ENEMIES OF THE FARMER. 



" A tremendous shower of grasshoppers came from 

 the South completely filling the air as high as one could 

 see, and looking like a driving snow-storm." " They 

 almost darken the sun in their flight, and eat everything 

 green in their path." " Imagine every green thing on 

 the face of the earth eaten entirely up, the meadows and 

 bluegrass pastures as bare of vegetation as the center 

 of a state road that is traveled a great deal, and you 

 can probably form some idea of our conditions at this 

 time." These are extracts from letters that the farm- 

 ers of western Missouri wrote in 1874 about the 

 hordes of grasshoppers that overran some of the west- 

 ern states in that year. It is said that these locusts 

 caused a loss to Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa 

 in 1874 of $40,000,000. In some portions of these 

 states the people faced a famine. 



The cotton boll weevil destroys millions of dollars' 

 worth of cotton every year. The chinch-bug on wheat 

 and corn, the boll worm on cotton and corn, and the 

 weevils in stored corn, wheat and other grains cause a 

 loss to the farmers of this country of many millions of 

 dollars annually. It is estimated that insects cause 



