^B The Tea insects of India. 



Darjiling-, where they were said to feed upon tea bushes. The figure 

 shows the female moth, also the caierpillar, botli natural size. 





The figure of the moth is from a specimen reared in the Indian 

 Museum^ that of the caterpillar is after Moore. The male moth is a 

 brownish creature not unlike the female, but differs in being very consi- 

 derably smaller and in having pectinated antenuse. The caterpillar is 

 covered with hair. One of the specimens sent to the Museum was 

 found to be parasitized by the Taehinid Trijcolyga homhycis, Becher. 

 No further information has been obtained^ but the insect is likely to have 

 very similar habits to the Dasychira sp. described above. 



Undetermined hair-covered caterpillar. The precise 



identity of this insect has not yet been ascertained. The following ex- 

 tract from a note by the writer [Indian Museum Notes, Vol. Ill, page 

 2 ) gives all that has yet been recorded about it :— ^ 



" In April 1891 specimens were furnished by Messrs. Andrew Yule & Co, of an 

 insect wliicli had proved destructive to tea {Camellia tlieifera) in the Jorhat district 

 of Assam. The manager of one of the gardens wrote that he had been getting twenty- 

 five 2 -maund bags of these caterpillars picked off the bushes daily, but that in spite 

 of all his efforts they seemed rather to increase in numbers. They stripped the leaves 

 and the bark of the bushes to such an extent as in some cases to kill the plants. The 

 manager added that during the ten years he had been in the district he had never seen 

 such a visitation, and that his coolie sirdars, some of whom had been over twenty years 

 on the garden, could not remember the like. The specimens that were forwarded 

 were found to be the larva3 of a Bombyces moth which is thought to belong to the 

 family Arctiidse. The insect does not appear to have been previously sent to the 

 Museum as attacking tea, and it cannot be identified precisely without an examina- 

 tion of the moth into which the caterpillar transforms." 



Andraca trilochoides, Moore. The caterpillars of this species 

 ( — J, bipunctata, Haropson) were reported in 1893 as doing a good deal 

 of damage by defoliating tea bushes both in Cachar and Jorhat. The 



