56 



ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF ONTARIO. 



the stalks to the ears. Fortunately the grain was rapidly ripening and soon became too 

 hard for the jaws of the caterpillar and the loss was not so serious as might have been 

 anticipated. 



About the first of August the moths began to appear and for a couple of weeks they 

 swarmed in countless myraids. Some Tartarean honey-suckle bushes in my garden were 

 laden with ripened berries; these attracted the moths to such an extent th it the twigs 

 were covered with them towards evening and during the night. On being disturbed by 

 shaking the bushes, they would fly out in clouds. The moth has always been familiar to 

 us, and is often taken by collectors when " sugaring" in the summer, but I never before 

 saw it in such abundance. 



On writing to Mr. Tighe about this time, recommending the destruction of the moths, 

 which could be attracted by sugar or light, and enclosing specimens in order that there 

 might be no difficulty in identifying them, he replied that the worms had disappeared 

 shortly after his previous communication and no further damage had been done by them. 

 They had, of course, completed their larval period and had gone into the ground to trans- 

 form into chrysalids, large numbers of them then dying from the internal ravages of 

 parasites. 



In addition to the good work of the Tachina flies, which resemble the ordinary house- 

 fly and appeared in swarms over infested fields, the worms were attacked by several 

 species of predaceous insects, and were also devoured in large numbers by the English 

 sparrow, which in some localities visited the army-worm districts in great flocks. 



The Tussock-worm. 



Another insect which attracted much attention this summer and brought out many 

 articles and letters in the newspaper?, was the Tussock- worm (Orgyia leucostlgma), which 

 defoliated many shade trees in the streets of Toronto. As it has been fully dealt with 

 already by Prof. Panton in his valuable and interesting address, I need not go over the 

 same ground again. During my occasional visits to Toronto, I have noticed this inspct 

 for several years past and have drawn the attention of friends to its injurious work on 

 their shade trees. It ought not to be a difficult insect to control as it caonot spread with 

 any great rapidity owing to the fact that the female is wingless and can only crawl a 

 short distance. The cocoons are usually so conspicuous in the autumn after the leaves 

 have fallen and during the winter, that boys could be employed to scrape them ofl and 

 destroy them. A tree once cleared will remain for a long time free from any further 

 attack. In Port Hope the insect is common enough, but has never been so abundant as 

 to cause any appreciable injury. 



The Black Potato Beetle. 



At the end of June I received from the Editor of the Afattawa Tribune, some speci- 

 mens of a beetle that was attacking the 

 potato plant in myriads in the neighbor- 

 hood of Mattawa, Ont. They proved to 

 be the black blistering beetle (Macrobasis 

 unicolor, Kirby), a species that belongs to 

 to the same family, Meloidse, as the 

 " Spanish-flies," which are used for blis- 

 tering purposes by the medical profession, 

 and that possesses the same vesicating 

 properties. The insect (Fig. 56 ) is long 

 Fig. 56. and slender, about half an inch in length, 



black in colour and covered with fine whitish hairs which give it an ashen appearance ; 

 these hairs are easily rubbed off and leave the insect quite black. It is a northern species 

 and is much more commonly found in the upper Ottawa region and on Manitoulin Island 

 than in Southern Ontario. In the neighborhood of Montreal it has been very abundant 



