205 
;frons Meig., tbe only one known to attack growing beans in this country, 
would content itself in restricting this source of food supply for our 
Canadian cousins. June 1 a lot of injured bean plants with a large 
number of maggots were received from Tippecanoe County, Ind., while 
on the following day another lot came from Van Wert County, in 
western Ohio, where it was accused of working serious injuries in 
the fields. Having never before received it or known of its occurrence, 
this second lot was a good deal of the nature of a surprise. Adult 
flies were reared from both consignments, appearing June 10 to 18. 
Sonic of the plants seemed to have hardly gotten above the surface of 
the ground, while others indicated by their size that the attack had 
not begun until they had acquired several leaves. 
A threatened outbreak of the grain aphis (Siphonophora avence Fab.) 
failed to materialize, except in a few localities. As in the past, when 
this insect h..s been overabundant, the weather during May and early 
June was cold and wet, for less favorable for the parasitic enemies of 
the pest than for the latter, thus giving it the advantage of a more or 
less unrestricted multiplication. This I believe to be the secret of the 
occasional outbreaks of SipKonophora avence. I was wholly unable to 
keep them on young wheat plants growing in the insectary, after the 
kernels began to harden in the wheat heads in the fields outside. They 
simply will not stay on wheat during midsummer. 
Until this year I had supposed that, in the Northern States at least, 
we need have no fears of depredations from mole crickets {Gryilotalpu 
borealis Burm.). But twice this season specimens have been sent me 
from widely distant localities in Ohio, in one case accused of destroy- 
ing growing vegetables and flowers, and in the other destroying pota- 
toes in the field by gnawing the tubers, the former in Portage and the 
latter in Delaware County. 
July of this year brought me another of several reminders that the 
economic entomologist, or any others who delight in solving the mor- 
phological problems connected with the insect fauna of our Western 
swamp lands, will find ample material and no lack of opportunity for 
enriching science, at least during the next two or three decades. From 
the Alleghany Mountains to the Mississippi River, north of the Ohio, 
a greater or less area of swamp land is each year underdrained and 
brought into cultivation, and as the natural flora is exterminated, the 
insects which fed thereon, and notably the Rhynchophora, for the first 
year at least, transfer their attention to the crops of the husbandman. 
The swamp bill-bug (tiphcnophorus oclirem Lee), which Prof. Forbes has 
studied in Illinois and I in Indiana, is a good illustration.* In Wayne 
County, Ohio, a field of this swamp land was underdrained last year, 
and last January was plowed; no further cultivation being given it until 
quite late spring, when it was prepared and planted to Cabbage, about 
"Sixteenth Report State Entomologist of Illinois, pp. 58-74, Pis. i, n. in. Insect 
Life, vol. n, pp. 132-134. tigs. 20, 21. 
