﻿8 BULLETIN 5, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



clence at Experiment, Ga., March 12, and that they had become 

 abundant on alfalfa by March 28. 1 



"While all of these data may at first seem of little consequence, they 

 bear directly, as will appear later, on what now seems to be the 

 planter's only hope of eliminating the ravages of the pest in his 

 cornfields. It is fair to suppose that these females deposit eggs in 

 the fields as soon as there is food for the larvae, and it is the larvae 

 from these eggs that become so destructive in the fields of young 

 corn, especialty in the South. The reason they are not equally in- 

 jurious in the North may perhaps be that by the time oviposition 

 begins in spring and the larva? have hatched corn has become too 

 advanced in growth to enable these young larva? to penetrate the 

 stem at the usual point of attack. 



Mr. Vickery, who followed the species through the season at Salis- 

 bury, N. C, in 1909, settled the question of the number of generations 

 that occur annually at that point, finding that there are two. All of 

 the observations of the author and those of several of the men work- 

 ing under his direction have shown that this is generally true 

 throughout the country where the adult hibernates, but may not 

 apply in the far South, where hibernation does not take place. 



Prof. Quaintance, at Experiment, in central Georgia, noted the first 

 appearance of the larva? attacking corn on May 2. The first pupa 

 was found May 8, and the first adult, evidently of the new generation, 

 May 12. 



Mr. C. L. Foster wrote as follows from Dalton, in northern Georgia, 

 on July 30, 1910: 



I am mailing you a sample of worm that is causing great damage to the 

 corn crop of our country. When the corn plant is small these worms bore into 

 the center of the stalk underneath the soil and kill the plant by destroying the 

 " bud." When the plants are larger they bore into some of the larger roots, 

 but more generally into the stalks among the roots, which does not kill the 

 plant outrigbt, but injures it so that it rarely produces corn to amount to 

 anything. The plat where these were found has been planted three times this 

 season, and there are very few stalks now on the plat but what have been 

 injured by the worms. The worms were not so plentiful on July 23 as they 

 were on July 6, when the samples first sent you were collected. 



From the foregoing letter it would appear that the second genera- 

 tion of larva? were at work in late June and July in northern Georgia. 



Mr. George G. Ainslie studied the larva?, at that time 3 to G milli- 

 meters in length, at Hurricane, Tenn., May 27 to 30, 1912. They 

 must have been full grown by the latter date, as none could be found 

 in the fields June 5, and a recently emerged adult was taken on 

 June 14. 



The author observed full-grown larvo? attacking late-planted corn 

 at La Fayette, Ind., July 12, 1888, and in such enormous numbers 



1 Loc. cit. 



