PREVIOUS WORK WITH INSECT PARASITES. 45 



kindness of the officers of the Royal Italian Line steamship Duca di 

 Genova, was enabled to suspend the box by a cord from a crossbeam in 

 the ordinary cold room of the steamer. After an eleven days' passage, 

 the box was opened in Prof. Silvestri's laboratory in Portici, and prac- 

 tically every coccinellid was found to be alive and in apparently good 

 condition. 



Efforts have been made by the Bureau of Entomology, in coopera- 

 tion with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, to introduce a large bembecid 

 wasp (Monedula Carolina Fab.) from New Orleans into Algeria to prey 

 upon the tabanid flies concerned in the carriage of a trypanosome 

 disease of dromedaries. The wasps were sent in their cocoons in re- 

 frigerating baskets from New Orleans by direct steamer to Havre and 

 from New York by direct steamer to Havre. There they were met by 

 agents of the Pasteur Institute, carried to Marseilles by rail and thence 

 by boat to Algeria, and were planted under conditions as closely as 

 possible resembling those under which they were found in Louisiana, 

 care being taken to simulate not only the character of the soil but the 

 exposure to light, the prevailing wind directions, and the moisture 

 conditions. Adults issued, but the species has not since been re- 

 covered', although it is quite possibly established. 



In the same way an attempt was made to introduce the common 

 bumblebee Bombus pennsylvanicus De Geer of the United States into 

 the Philippine Islands for the purpose of fertilizing red clover. These 

 were sent in refrigerating baskets, carried by hand by Filipino stu- 

 dents returning from the United States to the Philippines, and for the 

 most part in the pupal stage. These were properly planted upon 

 arrival and reared, and a few specimens have been recovered. 



In the summer of 1910 Dr. L. P. De Bussy, biologist of the Tobacco 

 Planters' Association of Deli, Sumatra, visited the United States for 

 the purpose of investigating damage to the tobacco crop by insects 

 and disease and to make an effort to import into Sumatra the parasites 

 of the destructive tobacco worm known as Heliothis obsoleta Fab. 

 Already shipments of an egg parasite, Trichogramma pretiosa Riley, 

 have been made to Sumatra via Amsterdam, but information as to 

 the results of these preliminary shipments has not yet reached this 

 country. 



Prof. C. H. T. Townsend, an assistant in the Bureau of Entomology, 

 receiving a temporary appointment as entomologist to the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture of Peru, especially to study the injurious work 

 done by the scale insect HemicJiionaspis minor Mask, on cotton, has 

 during the past year, with the assistance of the bureau, imported a 

 number of shipments of Prospaltella oerlesei from Washington into 

 Peru. It is too early to announce results. 



In July, 1910, Mr. R. S. Woglum, an agent of the Bureau of Ento- 

 mology, was sent abroad to find the original home of the white fly of 



