INJURIOUS INSECTS. 89 



Wire Worms or Drill Worms (Motor) —Wire worms cause dam- 

 age by boring into potatoes and some seeds in the ground. 

 They are the larvae of a snapping or clicking beetles, so-called 

 from the ease with which, if laid on their backs, they spring 

 into the air with a clicking noise. The larvae are slender 

 wirelike worms, having a glassy tough skin of a yellowish or 

 brownish color. The larval stage lasts for two and possibly 

 five years ; it is therefore no small job to clear a piece of land 

 badly infested with this pest. Naturally, wire worms live in 

 grass land where the harm they do is not apparent, but when 

 such land is planted to corn or potatoes and the worms are 

 thus deprived of their natural food, they may become very 

 troublesome. 



Remedies. — Late fall plowing is desirable for land infested 

 with wire worms since it exposes and thus kills all that are 

 ready to pupate. By clean summer fallowing the land one 

 season the worms are starved out. if no plants whatever are 

 permitted to grow on it. 



Cut Worms (Agrotis Sp.) — Cut worms often cause serious 

 injury by eating vegetable plants. They are generally most 



Fig. 37. Cut Worm and moth, 

 injurious while the plants are small, when they often bite off 

 young cabbage, bean, corn or other plants close to or just 

 under the ground and thus destroy them. Their work is most 

 perceptible in the spring, on account of the small amount of 

 growing vegetation at that time, yet they also work in the 

 autumn. True cut worms are the larvae of several night 

 flying moths which appear late in summer. The female de- 

 posits her eggs late in the summer. These soon hatch into 

 cut worms which enter the ground and live near the surface 

 on the tender roots of grass and other plants until the ap- 

 proach of cold weather. They then descend deeper into the 

 ground and remain torpid until spring, when they come to 



