MAINE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 37 



So serious a pest should be known by every one in the State, 

 because although extermination of this insect may not be pos- 

 sible, much practical and effectual work can be done in holding 

 it in check and reducing its numbers so that damage to orchard 

 and shade trees may be very slight. 



The moths, expanding from one and one-fourth to one and 

 three-fourths inches, are white except for the abdomen, which 

 is tinged with brown and tipped with a tuft of brown hairs. 

 This tuft is small and dark in the male, but the large golden- 

 brown tuft in the female is conspicuous enough to be the most 

 striking characteristic of the moth, and has won for this insect 

 its descriptive name of "brown-tail." These moths are on the 

 wing in July, and unlike some closely related pests, the brown- 

 tail females as well as the males are strong fliers. They are 

 active at night, and as lights have 'an attraction for them, they 

 sometimes fly a long way toward a lighted district. 



The female usually selects a leaf near the tip of the branch 

 on which to deposit from one hundred and fifty to three hun- 

 dred eggs. Some of the brown hairs from the abdominal tuft 

 adhere to the egg-mass and give it the appearance of a brown 

 felt lump. 



By the middle of August most of the eggs are hatched and 

 the young caterpillars spin a slight web over the leaf -near the 

 egg cluster. When they have eaten all but the skeleton of the 

 first leaf, they draw another into the web and repeat the process 

 at intervals during the late summer. They feed slowly, how- 

 ever, and spend so much time spinning their web that they do 

 comparatively little damage to the trees in fall, and they are still 

 very small (about one-fourth of an inch in length) when cold 

 weather comes on. 



The winter nests. — (Fig. 38). In the fall the young cater- 

 pillars weave additional layers of silk about their retreat, fas- 

 tening it securely to the branch by the web, and pass the winter 

 thus in colonies of one hundred and fifty to three hundred in a 

 single nest. This is a very unusual yet most commendable 

 habit in a caterpillar pest, for they can be killed, hundreds at a 

 time, simply by burning the nests in which the colonies hiber- 

 nate. The nests, composed of leaves, bound firmly together by 

 a silken web, are varied in shape. In spite of the superficial 

 variety the essential characteristics of the brown-tail moth nests 



