154 Forty-first Report on the State Museum. 



would be fatal to the contained larvse, and almost as effective as 

 burning. An ordinary plowing was found ineffective in Massachu- 

 setts, as the insects having only been buried to a moderate depth, 

 completed their transformations and made their way to the surface. 



The broken-off, hardened pieces of the straw, observed as before 

 stated in threshing and cleaning, should be carefully collected and 

 burned. The grain should also be examined for these pieces and 

 picked out by hand. 



Examination should be made of the threshed straw, and if the larvse 

 are found therein, it should be destroyed, either by feeding or some 

 other consumption of it, before the ensuing spring. Dr. Harris 

 records an instance where so many of the insects infested a straw-bed 

 in Cambridge, Mass., that they proved troublesome to children sleep- 

 ing in the bed — ^ their bites or stings being followed by considerable 

 inflammation and irritation, which lasted several days. So numerous 

 were they, that it was found necessary to empty the bed-tick and burn 



the straw. 



Another Species Associated with. I. hordei. 



This report not having been published in compliance with the law 

 that requires the printing and presentation to the Legislature on or 

 before the first day of February of each year of all State Reports — 

 the delay in its appearance has permitted the addition of the following 

 note: 



The attack on the wheat straw noticed on page 148, and there identi- 

 fied, from the appearance of the larvse and characters of their cells, 

 as that of Isosoma hordei, proves not to have been confined to that 

 species. 



Daring the month of March, 1888, from some infested wheat straw 

 received from Mr. Boyd, on December 14, 1887 (a second sending), 

 which had subsequently been kept in a jelly glass, forty specimens of 

 Isosomas emerged. Of these, nine examples were characteristic 

 Isosoma hordei — one male and eight females. The others were 

 evidently a different species, as they were of a larger size in both 

 sexes, — the abdomen of the female distinctly angulated at the base 

 of the ovipositor, and prolonged conically in an acute point, and with 

 the veins of the anterior wings whitish, instead of black as in I. hordei. 

 Nine of these were males (in some of the species of Isosoma the male, 

 as before stated, is not known), and twenty-two females. 



The Associated Species is Isosoma captivum. 

 On submitting examples of the above to Professor Eiley, they were 

 recognized as a species which had been collected abundantly in 

 Illinois and Indiana in sweeping with a net in fields of blue grass, 



