37 
study of the pest, and from 1890 to 1893 several important contribu- 
tions were made to our knowledge of the insect, notably by Prof. H. 
Garman, Dr. S. A. Forbes, and Dr. C. V. Riley. The economic 
bibliography of Diabrotica 12-punctata includes some thirty refer- 
ences, though many of these are brief notes relative to the food 
habits of the adults. 
During the present spring the insect has been quite abundant in 
Georgia, and it has been the object of considerable complaint, not 
only on account of injury to corn by the larve, but on account of 
injury to the foliage of various plants by the adults. 
The first beetle observed by the writer was on March 12, when a 
gravid female was found in a road extending between two fields of 
fall-sown oats. March 138, twenty minutes’ sweeping of a rye field 
gave two dozen beetles, all gravid females. Some of these deposited 
numerous ege’s in the vials by the next morning. On March 22 but 
few beetles were to be found, owing to the cool weather, but on March 
28 they were exceedingly abundant, feeding on rye, oats, and alfalfa. 
Something like seventy-five were captured in a few minutes’ sweeping 
of alfalfa. The females captured were almost all heavy with eggs, 
these showing plainly through the abdomen as apparently fully devel- 
oped. Subsequent occasional sweepings of alfalfa and rye indicated 
that the beetles were most abundant about April 10, after which date 
there was a very pronounced decrease in the number captured, and 
many of the beetles captured had evidently oviposited. 
Most corn planted on the station had made its appearance above the 
soil by April 14, and careful examination was made almost daily to 
detect the beetles in the act of ovipositing. No beetles, however, 
were observed in the cornfields until the 19th, when three were cap- 
tured, one gravid, the other two having evidently oviposited. By 
the 24th, beetles were much more abundant in cornfields, and were no 
doubt ovipositing, though I could never detect them in the act. An 
hour’s search with a ‘‘bull’s-eye” lantern on each of two different 
nights, in fields where beetles had been somewhat numerous during 
the preceding afternoons, failed to find the beetles ovipositing. They 
were apparently, on the other hand, not active, many of them in more 
or less secluded situations. Beetles were observed to be more numer- 
ous on the higher parts of cornfields than on the bottoms, which is 
_the opposite of what would be expected, since the larve are undoubt- 
edly more numerous in wet bottom soils than elsewhere. It is a 
prevalent opinion among farmers in Georgia that eggs are deposited 
during the cool nights of April, and it may be that eggs are deposited 
mainly at night. Early morning search for beetles has never revealed 
them active, but in secluded situations, as within the young leaves of 
a corn plant or under trash on the ground, and they have not been 
observed to be active until warmed up by the morning’s sun. While 
