230 The Insects of the Past Year and Progress in Insect Studies. 



The other instance is that of a very small beetle, Silvanus Surinam- 

 ensis (Linn.), commonly known as the grain weevil, and oft-times 

 exceedingly annoying in granaries and mills. A house in Catskill had 

 been invaded by millions of them in the month of September, where 

 they took possession of beds and bedding and infested all farinaceous 

 food.. It was believed to have originated in some sweet corn stored in 

 a barn not far distant from the' house and, in its multiplication, to 

 have entered the house in search of food. The most efficient materials 

 for the destruction of the insect were found to be kerosene and 

 pyrethrum powder. 



In my second report several pages were devoted to observations on 

 the chinch-bug, Blissus leucopterus (Say), in Jefferson county, in the 

 year 1883, where so large an acreage of grass and clover was destroyed 

 by it as to occasion great alarm, and excite the fear that it was des- 

 tined to become one of the permanent pests of our State, as it for a 

 long time has been of several of the Western States. Professor Forbes, 

 State entomologist of Illinois, has written of it: "It is the most 

 dangerous insect foe with which we have to deal. That it taxes them 

 more heavily than all other such enemies combined, is burnt into 

 the convictions of thousands of farmers by repeated heavy losses and 

 bitter disappointment." 



The following year, 1884, as the result of the thorough plowing, 

 burning and other active measures with which it was met, and no 

 doubt, also, to seasonable conditions unfavorable to it, it did not reap- 

 pear in Northern New York in injurious number. Since that time I 

 have had no knowledge of further injuries from it, until quite recently, 

 a correspondent, Mr. Van Duzee, of Buffalo, who is making special 

 study of the order of Hemiptera, to which the chinch-bug belongs, 

 has written me of serious losses resulting from its presence in Erie 

 county, particularly in the central portion of the county, near Lan- 

 caster. He reports a field of three acres of timothy grass at Lancaster 

 which in 1888 yielded as fine a crop as was ever seen, the past year 

 not worth the cutting, as the result of the operations of the bug. 

 Fortunately the attack was arrested and kept from spreading, as it 

 gave every indication of doing, by the cold heavy rains that com- 

 menced on the 18th of May and continued for nearly a month, fol- 

 lowed by the notable sharp frost on the 29th of May. Many of the 

 farmers had complained to him of serious injuries to their hay crops 

 in 1888 and 1889, "from the bug." 



