ENTOMOLOGIC. 51 



such traps at intervals of a few weeks, and by burning their bark, we can 

 greatly lessen the danger. With care, bark-beetles can be kept in 

 check. 



OTHER INJURIOUS INSECTS. 



Their name is "legion" and their depredations beyond control. Beetles, 

 moths, caterpillars, vegetable lice, don't they multiply? Wilson, the 

 ornithologist, pertinently asks: "Would it be believed that an insect no 

 larger than a grain of rice, should silently and in one season destroy some 

 two thousand acres of pine trees, many of them from two to three feet in 

 diameter and a hundred and fifty feet high?" 



Fight them we must. How? With poisons; and thereby we endanger 

 the existence of our 



FRIENDLY INSECTS. 



The wild honey bees that store their food in the hollows of the old trees 

 are the fertilizers of the forest flowers. By their instrumentality the 

 forest is perpetuated and improved. How do men reward them for this 

 providential beneficence? In the dead of the winter they rob them of all 

 their honey and kill them. The wood-wasps are also pollen carriers. As 

 they store no honey to rob, men send shot through their nests or burn 

 them up. The demons of ignorance and rapacity are at work by ax and fire 

 and bee-killing, and the forest recedes and rots and dies. But for the 

 friendly insects we would have precious few trees or crops cf any kind. 



OUR INSECTIVOROUS BIRDS. 



Frank H. Palmer, in "Agriculture of Massachusetts," aptly says: "If 

 left to herself, nature establishes a wholesome equilibrium between the 

 feathered and insect tribes. She produces no more insects than can be 

 kept in check by the birds. But man, by his artificial habits, disturbs the 

 proper balance between these tribes. By cutting down the woods, by 

 disturbing the quiet of the forest by the sharp report of the gun, he 

 destroys or drives away the birds, and thereby stimulates the production 

 of insects, which become almost the greatest pests of the agricultural 

 interests of the country. Nature has given to birds an appetite and an 

 instinct which teaches them exactly when and how to go to work to capture 

 and destroy insects and their eggs; and if the number of eggs produced by 

 insects is wonderful, so the number destroyed by a single bird is marvelous. 

 Bradley says that a pair of sparrows will destroy 3,300 caterpillars in a single 

 week." Another reliable ornithologist states that two old birds with five 

 young will destroy in a single day's feeding 700 insects. If two birds can do 

 so much work for us, think of the vast multitude of birds in the fields, as yet 



