70 



will find an anodyne for his mental sufferings in the thought that at any rate some of 

 his insect foes have been condemned to the fate of Herod. 



V. "We have lastly to consider insects indirectly hurtful. These consist of the 

 foes of the fruit-growers friends. The hive-bee suffers from the opei-ations of Gal- 

 leria cereana (Fabr.). A moth which ventures within the hive and, even when perish- 

 ing under the attacks of the bees, manages to deposit eggs in nooks and corners by 

 means of its long telescopic ovipositor. Its larvse construct silken galleries, and push 

 their way under cover through and through the comb, working sad destruction. The 

 humble-bees' nests are open to the visits of the cuckoo-bee. Apathus ashtoni (Oresson,). 

 This insect lays its eggs in the pollen masses provided by the humble-bee for its own 

 young. The larvse of one or two species of Volucella eat the young themselves. 

 The larvaB of the Musk Beetle, Meloe augusticollis (Say) lie in wait in the heads of 

 flowers, especially in the catkins of the sallow. When the humble-bees come the 

 larvse cling to them, and are carried to the bees' nests, where they feed on the bee- 

 bread and the larvse of the bees. The humble-bee itself is assailed by parasites. 

 The grubs of that remarkable beetle, Stylops childreni (Westwood), are found in its 

 abdomen, and so are the maggots of one or two species of cynips. 



Under the head of insects indirectly injurious to fruit culture we might include 

 the foes of the foes of hurtful insects ; but 1 must not try j'our patience by leading 

 you further amid the intricacies of the marvellous machinery of nature. No man 

 knows, and probably no man ever will know, the bearing of its eveiy part. When 

 we come to the subject of parasites of parasites, the recollection of the old rhyme 

 which we have all heard speedily pulls us up — 



*' Big fleas have little fleas, 



And little, less, to bite 'em 

 And these fleas have other fleas, 



And so, ad injinitum. " 



We have seen, then, that there are many kinds of insects directly favourable to 

 fruit culture ; that the fruit>grower has many trusty allies — an active insect police 

 — guarding his trees from the destruction that would otherwise await them ; that, 

 besides these, and the neutral insects, there are numerous others working directly, 

 or indirectly, against him. It is important that he should be able to distinguish his 

 friends from his foes. An episode will make this more apparent. I was once walk- 

 ing with a gentleman in a garden of which he was very proud. I noticed a cluster 

 of microgaster cocoons on one of the beds ; and I said, " Do you see those? " In an 

 instant, before I could interpose, he had vindictively crushed them under foot. I 

 said, " You have been too hasty. Those were cocoons of a species of ichneumon fly 

 which is one of the fruit-grower's best friends. There were probably fifty cocoons in the 

 cluster, containing insects the offspring of one mother-fly. Now, supposing half of 

 these to have been females, and that each female would lay forty eggs, in due course 

 of events there would nextyear have been 1,250 of the insectsworkingin your favour. 

 And if you choose to carry on the calculation, you will find that at the end of five 

 years there would, nothing interfering, have been 488,281,250 of their descendants 

 labouring for the fruit-growers' benefit." 



A slight knowledge of entomology — suffiicient to/ enable the fruit-grower to dis- 

 tinguish his friends from his foes — may now be acquired without much difficulty ; 

 and where he is in doubt as to the nature of an insect, let the fruit-grower give the 

 insect the benefit of the doubt. 



It is not now as it was twenty-eight years ago, when I commenced to study Cana- 

 dian insects with nothing but my knowledge of European entomology for a guide. In 

 1859 Breckenbridge Clemens wrote to the editor of the English Entomological 

 Intelligence, from Easton, Pennsylvania, " With us everything has j^et to be done ;" and 

 in the same year Packard wrote from Brunswick, Maine, to the same editor, " You 

 see our moths have not been worked up at all as yet." Grote tells us that in 1862 

 there were probably " not one hundred species named and determined in any collec- 

 tion." How great has been the change in the interval 1 Packard, Eiley, Lintner, and 

 others, have done admirable woik for the advancement of Economic Entomology on 

 this continent. In Canada, the Entomological Society of Ontario, under the fostering 



