264 How THE FARM PAYS. 



and wholly destroy it. It is then that the beetle can be attacked most 

 effectively. A light sprinkling of a mixture of fine flour, or ground 

 gypsum, or fine, dry lime, with one-thousandth part by measure of 

 Paris Green upon the young leaves, will destroy every beetle. Every 

 female beetle and these are far more numerous than the males that is 

 destroyed, of course prevents the laying of more than 1,000 eggs, and 

 as these eggs will hatch and produce a second brood, and this a third, 

 it follows that one female less in the spring is equivalent to many 

 millions less in the late summer, and, of course, the next year. This 

 fact illustrates the absolute necessity that farmers should neglect no 

 opportunity of destroying these pests at any time and opportunity, 

 either by hand picking the beetles early in the season, when they may 

 be few, and using the Paris Green mixture (a mixture in water is 

 equally effective and safer in use) upon every possible occasion. This 

 insect attacks potatoes, egg plants and tomatoes, all species of the 

 Solanum family, to which its natural food plant, the Horse Nettle, 

 belongs. 



THE CHINCH BUG. 



This insect is not more than one-tenth of an inch in length, has 

 the usual disagreeable odor of its f aniiry, and, like other bugs, lives by 

 suction. It attacks wheat, corn, oats and other small grains, as well 

 as timothy grass, and in some cases destroys meadows and leaves the 

 ground bare. It is black, with white fore wings, and when in a mass 

 upon a plant appears like gray dust. It usually appears on the wheat 

 in June, and later on the corn; at times it also attacks, through the 

 summer, all kinds of garden vegetables. It exists from Maine to beyond 

 the Missouri Kiver, but is most destructive in the central Mississippi 

 Yalley. Recently it has done much damage in the meadows of northern 

 New York. It is subject to a parasitic disease, which prevails mostly 

 in cold, wet seasons, when the insects are weakened, and at such times 

 almost wholly disappears, but it increases very rapidly, and soon again 

 becomes destructive, when the season is favorable to it. There is but 

 one remedy, and this is to burn off all the stubble from the fields in 

 the fall, or to plow it under deeply, and leave no harboring places 

 in which the pest may survive the winter. 



THE HESSIAN FLY. 



This insect has at times wholly prevented the culture of wheat, in 

 localities where this grain is a leading crop. It is a small fly which 

 appears late in August and early in September, and lays its eggs in 



