6lt 



The insect has been already described in the Bulletin (Vol. 3 to 5, 

 page 160). The account of its life history by Lefroy is as follows, much 

 condensed however. The eggs are laid in cracks in the soil where the 

 female scratches earth over them or occasionally on the bract of a cotton 

 boll. The insect lays from 80 to 100 eggs which hatch in a week. The 

 bugs pass through five months, and are adult in from forty-nine to 

 eighty-six days, after the last mault they are not sexually mature for 

 some time, as much as three weeks, when they begin to breed. 



The bugs attack besides cotton, the ocher (Hibiscus esculentus) 

 commonly known here as ladies' fingers, and according to Lefroy 

 prefer this to the cotton hanging in clusters on the pods, and also it is 

 partial to the silk cotton tree Bombax malabaricum on the seeds of 

 which it feeds. Lefroy knows only one other distinct food plant the 

 cultivated hollyhock and has reports of its occurence on Hibiscus 

 abelmoschus and the garden Hibiscus. (Here however it attacks many 

 other malvaceae besides these.) 



He finds it also however on maize, wheat and other plants when 

 its ordinary food fails. The chief harm the bug does is to spoil the 

 young bolls by sucking them and preventing their development, and by 

 destroying the seeds and dirtying the lint with excrement, in older 

 ones. 



In India the insects breed as long as food is abundant and the 

 weather is warm, while in the cold weather they hide away in fallen 

 leaves, grass etc. The long hot dry weather is passed in shelter or 

 feeding on any available plants. Insufficient food prevents breeding, 

 but the animals keep alive during a scarcity with any plants they can 

 do with and as soon as the cotton or Hibiscus is ready for them in 

 abundance they mature the sexual organs and breed. In the Straits 

 and peninsula we have no dry or cold season so that the animals can go 

 on breeding all the year round. 



In Pusa the simplest method for dealing with the bugs was found 

 to be to provide each coolie with a winnow and a kerosene tin contain- 

 ing a little water and kerosene. He shakes the bolls or shoots on 

 which the bugs are into the winnow, a quick jerk brings them to one 

 corner whence they are emptied into the tin. This method was found 

 to practically exterminate them ; spraying was found to be useless as 

 any insecticide strong enough to kill the bug, killed the plant. 



It was observed that the Hibiscus esculentus was more attractive 

 to the bug than cotton and it was grown as a trap crop, the bugs 

 collecting on the pods and leaving the cotton. It was very easy to 

 collect the bugs on the Hibiscus. 



An excellent colored plate gives figures of all the stages of the 

 bug's life, from the egg to the adult. 



H. N. Ridley. 



THE FUTURE OF COCOA PLANTING. 



(Review.) 



This little work is a reprint of a paper read at the Colonial Fruit 

 Show of the Royal Horticultural Society, (June 11th 1908) by 

 Mr. Harold"Hamel Smith, the Editor of "Tropical Life," and the author 



