38 



appeared in great numbers and inflicted severe injury on the great 

 seed farm of Northrup, Braslan & Co., of Minneapolis, Minn., at La 

 Moure, Dak. This firm has nine hundred acres in beans alone at 

 La Moure, and the loss which they sustained was quite serious. We 

 advised the use of the old remedy of driving the beetles into wiud- 

 rows of straw which are then burned. 



Anthomyia angustifeons a lignivorous Insect.— Late in the 

 summer we received from Mr. John G-. Jack, of Ohateaugay Basin, Prov- 

 ince of Quebec, Canada, specimens of a fly which he described as feeding 

 in the larva state upon planted beans. Somewhat to our surprise the 

 flies proved to belong to Anthomyia angustifrons, Meig., a species which 

 we had described both in our Ninth Report on the Insects of Missouri 

 and in the First Report of the United States Entomological Commission^ 

 as preying upon the egg pods of the Rocky Mountain Locust. This dis- 

 crepancy in habit is so marked that we wrote to Mr. Jack for full par- 

 ticulars and quote from his reply : 



"In answer to your inquiries about the bean-feeding habit of An- 

 thomyia calopteni, I gladly give what notes I possess. I first noticed 

 the larvae on June 25. We had planted a bushel of Golden Wax beaus 

 and a few of some other varieties on or about June 15. They had not 

 come through the soil by the 25th, and on scratching away a little of 

 the earth above the rows, I was surprised to find that, although the 

 beans were well sprouted and some of them were near the surface, yet 

 they had an unhealthy appearance, and on examining the cotyledons and 

 stems, I found them infested with maggots. They were in numbers of 

 from one or two to twenty-five or more in a plant, and the interior of 

 the bean and stalk was so eaten away in many instances that only a 

 very thin wall remained. I collected a large number of the larvae and 

 kept them until they had produced the flies. The larvae were collected 

 on June 25, and on the 28th a good number had entered the ground to 

 pupate, and on July 2 all of my specimens had pupated and I could 

 not find a maggot in the field. On July 9 and 10 most of the imagines 

 appeared. One-half of the field in which these larvae were so abun- 

 dant had been sown in buckwheat the year before, and the other half 

 had a black currant plantation from which the old bushes had been re- 

 moved. It was in that part of the field where the currant bushes had 

 been that the Anthomyia larvae were most destructive. Certainly more 

 than nine-tenths (90 per cent.) of the beans were completely destroyed 

 and never grew sufficiently to reach the ground. On the other half of 

 the field, where the buckwheat had been grown, very few of the beans 

 were affected. They were all covered with a plow, with about three 

 inches of soil. The soil is a sandy loam, and the rows ran north and 

 south through both pieces of land, so that the difference caused by the 

 attack of Anthomyia was very marked. In another field, on July 17, I 

 found occasional beans that had not come through the ground, and in 

 them I found several maggots which I think were of the same species. 



