172 MAINE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. I905. 



This will suffice to show that among the natural agencies that 

 tend to check the increase of cottony grass scale, parasites are 

 especially efficient. A list of the parasites reared during two 

 years' observation of Maine material is given on a subsequent 

 page. 



NATURE OP INJURY. 



Like plant-lice and other hemipterous insects, scales weaken 

 their host plant by piercing the tissues with their sharp pointed 

 beaks and sucking the sap. Sometimes as many as 10 or 12 

 egg sacs are found attached to one blade, which means that 

 for weeks, lo or 12 scales have been draining sap from that 

 blade. Where the infestation is excessive the result is dead 

 grass and brown plots here and there through the field. Where 

 the infestation is less serious, it still means a shrinkage in the 

 hay crop corresponding to the amount of grass which has been 

 impoverished through the loss of sap. During 1904 and 1905 

 the places of worst infestation in certain Portland meadows 

 were revealed by irregular brown areas of dead grass. 



REJMEDIAL MSASURE;s. 



The point in regard to the life history of this insect which is 

 most significant in view of remedial measures is that the scale 

 passes the winter in the egg stage within the white egg sacs 

 attached to the grass blades, well up above the ground. Thus 

 a spring burning of the infested grass land will destroy the 

 whole generation unhatched, without injury to the grass. In 

 some instances this will mean a burning over of more than 50 

 acres, but in some the infestation is as yet restricted to spots a 

 few rods square here and there in the meadows. It is advisable 

 in districts where the scale has been especially conspicuous to 

 burn the grass along roadsides and in neglected corners, either 

 in the early spring or in the fall, so that such places will not 

 serve as breeding places for the scale. 



It is not improbable that if the fields should be left to them- 

 selves the parasites, or other natural agencies, would in time 

 master the scales and the grass lands contain only scattered 

 scales which would do practically no harm. As it is quite 

 impossible to predict whether such an adjustment, were it to 



