OUR RIVALS 143 



The tent caterpillar comes irregularly, and if left 

 to do its work undisturbed makes a terrible mess of 

 it. He will ruin an orchard, not only for the pres- 

 ent year, but will kill the trees. When this rival 

 is to appear you will see a few advance couriers the 

 year previous; attack them at once; burn out every 

 nest as soon as it appears, and instead of having mil- 

 lions you will have only a few hundreds to watch 

 for the critical year. 



Scale bugs infest our gardens and orchards and 

 must be looked for with considerable care, because 

 some of them multiply with great rapidity and do 

 their work with astonishing speed. The remedy is 

 kerosene emulsion, or whale oil soap, or both com- 

 bined, well sponged into the bark. A tree that has 

 become badly devitalized may as well be cut down. 

 The San Jose scale, which created terror all over the 

 continent and did immense mischief in a dozen States, 

 is now pretty well under control. Like all other 

 scales it sucks the sap and poisons the wood of the 

 tree at the same time. 



The lime-sulphur mixture was the remedy that 

 finally met the difficulty, as well as man could meet 

 it; when there came in a fungus parasite, an insignifi- 

 cant thing to be counted as an ally for a human being, 

 but so far as it has extended its work it has swept the 

 enemy before it. In my Florida garden, where the 

 scale had begun its ravages, the fungus completely 

 routed it in a single year. How far North this 

 friend will do its work I cannot say. 



