1899] ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 115 



society is ; What is the use of it f ( This is a practical age, and farmers cannot afford to 

 look at anything they have no use for, Now, an entomological society is simply 

 another name for a society of persons who are making some sort of observations about 

 insects — not merely butterflies — but grubs, bugs, worms etc., and the points I wish to 

 show are, that some knowledge of insects is very important to all of us who are engaged 

 in agriculture, so that we may rightly distinguish between our insect friends and our 

 insect foes ; and some knowledge of insects is also necessary in order that the farmer may 

 know how to deal with his insect foes, and how to make the most of his insect friends. 



Now to see how to deal with insect foes, we must first of all learn something about them ; 

 there are many, like the Hessian Fly, whose grubs do all the harm and many others, who 

 themselves as well as their grubs do the harm, like the Colorado Beetle. Insects that them- 

 selves do harm, do so by mouths that bite or mouths that only suck. Those that bite have 

 jaws, with which they bite off solid pieces of food from the plants or annimals they attack. 

 Some poisonous material must therefore be placed on their food, so that when this food 

 is eaten bv the insects they may be destroyed by the poison. Those insects that suck, 

 have no jaws, but sharp hollow beaks through which they suck the juice of the plants or 

 blood of the animals they attack. For sucking Insects it is therefore useless to place 

 poison on the plants, because, having no jaws, they only feed on liquids such as juice or 

 blood, for which they have to sink their beak-like tubes beneath the surface of the object 

 attacked. For this class of insects, substances, which kill by coming into contact with 

 the bodies must be used, e.g., kerosene and soap emulsion, or oils, which stops up the 

 breathing organs, The losses in agricultural products from insects and their grubs is 

 reckoned at fully ten per cent. 



A few of our common insect foes in this country are pretty well known. There is 

 the red turnip beetle, which destroys our Swede turnips [example of Entomoscelis adonidis 

 Fab, produced and handed round] The little turnip "fly" which destroys the young 

 turnips when in first *' leaf ". These " flies " are really little beetles, and, like all beetles, 

 pass through the grub and chrysalis stage, so that if we learn the probable date for hatch- 

 ing (for all insects are very regular) we shall know when to sow the turnip seed — They 

 should be sown either sooner than the beetle hatches, so as to get their second or third 

 rough leaf before it hatches, or they should be sown so much later than the hatching 

 time so that when the " flies" hatch they have to starve. And we must now, it seems, 

 look out for the Colorado beetle, or potato bag. It has appeared in two or three places 

 in Alberta this summer, and last year was injurious in several parts of Manitoba. The 

 red turnip beetle is sometimes mistaken for it, but the potato bug has ten stripes alto- 

 gether, and the red turnip beetle has only three, but both are destroyed by the same 

 treatment (Paris green solution). 



Now, all the insects I have mentioned have jaws, so that they are " biting ' insects, 

 and the remedy against them is to sprinkle poison on their food. 



Then there are the grubs that work underground or at the surface of the soil. We 

 all known the garden "cut-worm". This is a caterpillar, which eventually developes 

 into a very common moth that flies about our lamps and windows in the fall, and which 

 is easily caught and destroyed. When in the " grub " stage, it is very destructive to our 

 young cabbages and other young plants. It lodges during the day just under the soil — 

 you can find it in the mornings by the small hole it leaves In the ground near the plant 

 it has attacked over night. They come out only at night, and then they nibble through 

 the small stem of the plant, and sometimes draw the leaf down into the soil to consume 

 at leisure. Now these grubs are very fond of bran, so that a little damp bran with a very 

 small quantity of dry Paris green stirred in (proportions 50 to 1) will be sure to destroy 

 them, or wrap paper round your cabbages when you plant them out. Another very common 

 grub in our potato patches is the wire-worm. These are a nuisance in the way they 

 work into our best potatoes The wire-worm lives in the ground through the winter, 

 and in the spring, after going through one more stage (pupa), develops into a small 

 brown or black beetle, called a " click " beetle, because when the beetle is touched it 

 gives a quick spring away. These beetles we should learn to recognize as our foes, 

 and should kill them all on sight, because it is from their eggs that the next crop of 



