IKSKCTS INJURIOUS TO WHEAT. lOl 



bushels/' Professors Roberts, Slingerland, and Stone (1. c.) 

 state that the destruction during the past three seasons 

 has been the most severe ever experienced in New York, 

 conservatively estimating the loss in 1901 at 3,500,000 

 bushels of wheat, valued at about 13,000,000. Injury has 

 also been wide-spread and severe in Ohio, Michigan, and 

 neighboring States during the past few seasons, owing to 

 peculiar climatic conditions. In 1900 Prof. F. M. 

 Webster stated that a loss of about 60 per cent of the 

 wheat crop in Ohio, amounting to 24,000,000 bushels and 

 valued, at the market-rate, at $16,800,000, was due to 

 injury by this pest. 



History. — Having been first noticed as injurious on Long 

 Island, in 1779, near where the Hessian troops had landed 

 three years before, it seems altogether jorobable that it was 

 brought to this country by them, and it has therefore 

 been so named. Rapidly spreading over all the wheat 

 land in the East, it aj)peared in California in 1884, was 

 reported as injurious in England in 1886, and in 1888 was 

 found to be destructive in New Zealand. 



Description and Li fe-lii story. — The adult flies are little, 

 dark-colored gnats, about one-eighth of an inch long, but 

 these are less often seen than the immature stages. Each 

 of the females lays from one hundred to one hundred and 

 fifty minute reddish eggs, placing them in irregular rows 

 of from three to five, generally upon the upper surface 

 of the leaf, but in the spring often beneath the sheath 

 of the leaf. In a few days these hatch into small, 

 reddish maggots, which soon turn white, are cylindrical, 

 about twice as long as broad, and have no true head or 

 legs. The fall brood of maggots burrow beneath the 

 sheath of the leaf and its base, which is still below tjie 



