The Tea insects of India. 49 



essentially a hot-weather pest, and almost completely disappears when 

 the rains break, though colonies are subsequently to be found upon 

 sheltered bushes. 



In Ceylon, where red spider also attacks tea, Mr. E. E. Green has 

 noticed that the tomato plant is likewise liable to suffer. The figures, 



f 1 Itl 







which are after Wood-Masonj show the male and female mite both enor- 

 mously enlarged, The male is considerably smaller than the female, the 

 latter being described as about one twenty-fifth of an inch in length. 



The following is taken from Wood-Mason^s report :-^ 



" The mite lives in societies on the upper surface of the full-grown leaves, beneath 

 an exceedingly delicate web, which it spins for itself as a shelter. This web, ordinarily- 

 invisible to the naked eye, is often rendered visible by the deposition upon it of dew 

 in minute globules, which give to the leaves, when bathed in the morning sun, an 

 indescribably splendid appearance of being sprinkled over with minute diamonds. 

 I believe that this web serves chiefly as a protection to the tiny arachnids from dew and 

 light showers, for heavy rain, especially if long-continued,, breaks up the sheltering 

 webs, and thus leads to the disappearance, if not to the destruction, of the pest. 



'' The mites lay their eggs in hollows, close to the ribs of the leaves usually'. The 

 eggs are oblate spheroids, flatter at one pole, by which they are firmly and broadly 

 attached to the leaves, than at the other, at which their transparent sheU. is suddenly 

 drawn out into a long and tapering and slightly curled glossy process. They are red, 

 like the mite itself, and at the close of segmentation present at their surface a beauti- 

 ful reticulated pattern, due to the presence of a concentrated and dark-coloured layer 

 of protoplasm around the nuclei! of all the cells of the blastoderm. The young 

 arachnids leave the egg as six-footed larvae, which do not attach themselves as parasites 

 to the bodies of insects and spiders, as do their distant relations the Trombidiidse, nor 

 undergo any of those sti-ange changes which many other mites pass through in the course 

 of their development, but attain to the adult condition by a simple change of skin 

 that usually, though not perhaps invariably, is made on the same leaf as that on which 

 they emerged as larvae from the egg. The shells of the hatched eggs remain glued to 

 the leaf for some time as microscopically small objects resembling porcelain saucers. 



