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OUR INSECT FRIENDS. 



By Peof. A. J. Cook, of Pomona. 



California has much to be proud of, but it is to be doubted if in all 

 the long list of her achievements she has wrought better in any work or 

 suggestion than in the importation of beneficial insects. We think with 

 admiration of the introduction from Australia of Vedalia cardinalis, 

 and the rapid extermination by it of the cottony cushion scale. It was 

 a magnificent conception, and grand in the blessed result of ridding 

 California orchards of one of the worst of insect pests. The importa- 

 tation of the Rhizobii bids fair to be a close second in importance to that 

 of the Vedalia. While the Icerya purchasi was perhaps a more serious 

 pest in the citrus orchards than is the Lecanium olese, yet the latter is 

 exceedingly destructive and reaches with its blighting touch over into 

 the olive orchards, where it is even more harmful, possibly, to the trees 

 than to the orange and lemon. If Rhizobius ventralis will conquer the 

 Lecanium hesperidum and Lecanium pruinosum as effectively as it has 

 exterminated the black scale in the extensive orchards of President 

 Ellwood Cooper, and there is much reason to hope that it will do so; 

 then, indeed, we may regard this later importation as no less a benefac- 

 tion to our State than the introduction of the Vedalia itself. 



But the present value of this experiment, great as it is, is by no means 

 all. Are there not yet the red, the yellow, the purple, the pernicious 

 scales, etc.? These and many other destructive insect pests imperil our 

 California orchards and threaten the farmer and orchardist of other 

 States and countries. There is good reason to hope and expect that as 

 effective enemies for each and all of these exist, as those already found 

 for the white and the black scales. If they exist, can we doubt, in the 

 light of the happy experience already enjoyed by California, that they 

 will be found? To argue otherwise would be to affirm that our fruit 

 men are asleep. Here then is inaugurated a method of combating these 

 terrible foes that is fairly limitless in its promise of help to the fruit 

 grower. 



Old Massachusetts might well have come to young California for sug- 

 gestion, and have saved the hundreds of thousands of dollars already 

 expended in her fight with the gypsy moth. And the end is not yet. 

 Very likely a single thousand might have secured the Chalcids and 

 Ichneumonids that would have checked at once the advance of the gypsy 

 moth, and would soon have vanquished it from the forests and orchards 

 of the " Old Bay State." 



And it was California that inaugurated this new and marvelously 

 effective method of dealing with our insect foes. Surely too much 

 praise cannot be awarded to President Ellwood Cooper and others, who, 

 even in the face of most discouraging circumstances, demonstrated the 

 possibility of the utter extermination of our most dreaded insect pests, 

 and that with so little of labor and expense. There is every reason to 

 expect that further effort in the introduction of beneficial insects will be 

 crowned with no less success than has greeted the trials already made. 



There is another field for effort and experiment that holds out hardly 

 less of hope and promise than that already spoken of. I refer to the 

 wise distribution of our native parasitic and predaceous insects. 



Two years ago last January, I visited and inspected closely the large 



