290 WEST VIRGINIA EXPERIMENT STATION. 



condition, as was the bark on the trunk at the base, and from 

 six to ten feet above. Upon close examination when felled for 

 the purpose, and of those recently felled for saw logs, I found 

 the bark on the upper portion of the trunk to be inlested with 

 the same bark beetle, (Dendroctonus frontalis) together with 

 conclusive evidence that this insect had made the primary at- 

 tack and had mined in all directions through the living bark in 

 which eggs had been deposited and the young grubs had de- 

 veloped, long before any other insect had attacked any part of 

 the tree. On some trees, the leaves of which were yet normal 

 the bark on the upper part of the trunk was dead and infested 

 with fully developed larvae, pupae and recently matured 

 adults. 



The fact that examples of the bark beetle, (Dendroctonus 

 frontalis,) were associated with every one of the hundreds, or I might say, 

 thousands of the dying trees that I observed or carefully examined ; t/tt 

 the adults were frequently found mining in perfectly healthy bark of liv- 

 ing trees; that they were capable of living in and manipilating the pitch 

 that flowed into their freshly excavated galleries through the lark; tun/ 

 that all stages of the insect occurred in the bark of trees that were not yet 

 dead, was conclusive evidence to me that this insect icas the prime cause of 

 the widespread epidemic from which so many trees had died and /<<'/( 

 then dying. 



Upon my return to the Experiment Station, I prepared the 

 following article, a copy of which was sent to the State and 

 county papers. It was subsequently published in a large num- 

 ber of newspapers of this and adjoining States and extensively 

 commented upon by some of the principal newspapers of the 

 Eastern and Southern States. 



The object of this article was to call the attention of owners 

 of pine timber to the serious character of the trouble, and to 

 urge them to make every possible effort to utilize the dead and 

 dying timber before it was rendered worthless by the wood 

 boring insects which attack it the same or the following year 

 after the trees die. While this may have had the effect of 

 preventing the sale of some of the affected timber to innocent 

 purchasers, and in this manner proved obnoxious to a few own- 



