394 



beauty of my garden by strewing the ground with the flowers of both species indis- 

 criminately. Quite recently they have taken to eating off, close to the calyx, the 

 flower of the common yellow primrose (Primula vulgaris), but at present I have seen 

 none but yellow blooms so eaten, but I fear that they will soon find out that th« 

 darker-colored varieties are palatable, and then the deflorescence will extend. They 

 destroy the buds of my gooseberry bushes to a most vexing extent, often reducing 

 seriously the crop of this valuable fruit. 



My currant bushes they seriously injure in another way ; when the shoots are 

 young and have aphids upon them they endeavor most clumsily to eat a few, and by 

 their weight break the tender shoots down, so that they have to be removed. My 

 pears suffer sad damage. I have some excellent varieties that must not be gathered 

 too early, but the sparrows, as soon as the fruit begins to ripen, peck holes near the 

 stalk and thus utterly spoil the pears for keeping and render them too unsightly 

 for dessert, as well as injuring the flavor, if not rendering them flavorless. 



I do not know, near my house, that a single swallow {Hirundo urhica) has bred this 

 year. This valuable purely insectivorous bird is becoming rarer year by year, be- 

 cause the sparrows take possession of their nests and prevent their building. 



The sparrow is a serious question. I know of no other British finch that breeds 

 several times in the year and lays six eggs ; five is the normal number of finches, j 

 have even good reason to believe that a male sparrow has sometimes more than one 

 mate. I watched carefully the nest of a female sparrow one year; she had no tail, 

 and I never saw a bird with a tail near the nest. What a singular thing it is that 

 Passer domesticus should be so destructive, and Passer nocturnus does not increase 

 in a similar manner. The species can not be very remotely related, because my friend 

 Edward Newman obtained hybrids between them in his aviary. 



Our fight about the Colorado Potato Beetle has subsided, but I did ohtain italivein 

 some American potatoes. I. do not suffer much from the ravages of other insects or 

 snails in my garden ; the latter are rare with me ; the cause is the abundance of 

 thrushes and blackbirds. My greatest trouble is my greenhouse, where I have had 

 great destruction caused by the Aleurodes vaporioruni, no doubt the same species you 

 wrote about in reply to an inquiry in Insect Life, in which you stated you did not 

 know the name. My pest was named for me by Douglas, our best authority on the 

 subject. * * * — [J. Jenner Weir, Chirbury, Beckenham, Kent, England, De- 

 cember 28, 1890. 



Codling Moth in New Zealand. 



I am now in all respects splendidly situated for studying the habits of the Codling 

 Moth. Already I feel sure its life history wants rewriting in some respects. Sere, 

 at all events, it does not lay the egg on the blossom, nor yet, either invariably or even 

 very often, in the eye of the apple. The egg is laid anyivhere, and the little caterpillar 

 seeks the shelter of the eye, but I am convinced that it does not do so immediately, 

 but takes bites out of the skin here and there, and quite as often as not enters in other 

 places. This would account for the comparative ease of poisoning with Paris Green. 

 The caterpillars are leaving the apples now, and I have thousands under daily obser- 

 vation, and I mean to see whether any hymenopterous fly is at work, and also to 

 collect some hundreds later on (at different times) in the cocoons to see if I can find 

 any more of my dipterous. In the mean time, the "yellow hammers" (so called in 

 England) are very numerous, but by the closest every day observation I fail to see a 

 single instance of their attacking the Codling Moth larvae. I do not know what to 

 make of the strengths of Paris Green. Have burned foliage with 1 pound to 200 gal- 

 lons of water (used in the heat of the day), and my Nelson friends laugh at me for 

 advocating that strensjth and inform me that 1 ounce to 50 gallons of water is a strong 

 solution, and even much weaker is used with such success, that their once very severely 

 infested orchards are so far cured that they have ceased to grumble about the pest. 

 I can rely upon these people's statements, but here they use 1 pound to 50 gallons of 



