THE CHERRIES OF NEW YORK 93 



under the skin of the cherry in mid-summer. From these eggs small, 

 whitish maggots about one-third of an inch long hatch and eat out a cavity 

 in the ripening fruit. These maggots when ftill grown pupate in the ground 

 and remain there until the following season. The only effective pre- 

 ventive or remedial measure to take against the pest in large orchards is 

 to spray with a sweetened arsenical, but in small plantations chickens are 

 fairly effective in scratching up and eating the pupating maggots. 



The cherry fruit maggot is probably responsible for most of the 

 " wormy " cherries in New York but the plum curctilio is also a cause of 

 " wormy " fruits and in some seasons is a most formidable pest. This 

 curculio^ {Conotrachelus nenuphar Herbst) is a rough, grayish snout-beetle 

 somewhat less than a quarter of an inch in length, so familiar an insect 

 as scarcely to need further description. The female beetle pierces the 

 skin of the young cherries and places an egg in the puncture. About 

 this cavity she gouges out a crescent-shaped trench, this cut or sting being 

 a most discouraging sign to the cherry-grower, for he well knows that 

 from the eggs come, within a week or two, white and footless grubs which 

 burrow to the stone and make " wormy fruit." Some of the infested 

 cherries drop but many remain eventually to distract the housewife and 

 those who eat cherries out of hand. Jarring the beetles from the trees, 

 a method employed by plum-growers, is quite too expensive and ineffective 

 for the cherry -grower and poisoning with an arsenate is the only practical 

 means of combating the pest. Rubbish and vegetation offer hiding places 

 for the insects and, therefore, cultivated orchards are freer from curculio 

 than those laid down to grass. There are no cvircuHo-proof cherries but, 

 as with plums, the thin-skinned varieties are damaged most by the insect. 

 The grub of the plum curculio is easily distinguished from the cherry 

 fruit maggot. This " worm " is the larva of a beetle, a true grub, footless 

 and with a brownish, homy head while the cherry fruit maggot, the larva 

 of a two-winged insect, is a true maggot like that which comes from the 

 common house-fly and hardly to be distinguished from the apple maggot. 

 It is important to be able to distinguish in wormy cherries the grub of 

 the curciilio from the cherry fruit maggot in order to know and tinderstand 

 the nature of the two enemies in combating them. 



Another pest of this fruit is the cherry leaf-beetle {Galerucella cavicollis 

 Le Conte) the larvae of which sometimes do much damage to cherry 

 foliage. The adtilt insect is an oval, reddish beetle about one-fourth of 



'Riley, C.V. An. Rpt. State Entom. Mo. 1:50-56. 1869;3:11-29. 1871. 



