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JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 



[VoL 8 



to cowpeas should be made, and it was agreed that Mr. Parks should 

 concentrate his attention upon this problem. He soon proved the 

 identity of the larvae and did the major portion of the work until his 

 resignation in the following spring, when the writer took it up. The 

 full possibilities of the damage began to be realized during the following 

 summer when the larvae were found to be the most destructive on the 

 poor soils where soil enrichment through the growth of cowpeas was 

 of the greatest consequence, and when soy beans were found to be 

 seriously damaged in the same way. The present preliminary paper 

 includes none of the results of the past season during which active 

 work had been turned over to other hands, but the results obtained 

 up to that time are deemed important enough for publication now\ 



Distribution 



The bean-leaf beetle is found over the eastern portion of the country 

 from New York to Minnesota and southward to Kansas and the Gulf 

 of Mexico. It occurs in most destructive numbers in the south, 

 especially in the Gulf Coast States. 



Food-Plants 



It feeds on a rather long list of plants, all of which are legumes. 

 Recorded host plants include bush and pole beans, cowpeas, bush 

 clover {Lespedeza spp.), hog peanuts {Falcata comosa L.), and tick 

 trefoil or beggar weed {Meihoynia spp.), including the cultivated 

 beggar weed. Parks found adults on the leaves of Enghsh horse- 

 beans {Faba sp.) at Biloxi, Mississippi, and pupae near characteris- 

 tically injured nodules of soy beans. The writer has found soy beans 

 seriously damaged in Louisiana and has reared larvae from this host. 

 He has also found the larvae damaging nodules on some recently intro- 

 duced forage plants, such as the moth bean, Kulthi bean, and Phaseolus 

 sp. In the delta region of Mississippi Meibomia canescens seems to 

 be a native food plant and its nodules are damaged in the typical way. 

 Garden peas and velvet beans seem to be exempt. 



Life-History 



The notes on Hfe-historj^ apply to the latitude of central Mississippi, 

 most of this work being done at Greenwood. Here there are at least 

 three generations extending over the season, and the length of different 

 stages varies at different times of the year. The adults hibernate 

 under rubbish, in and near cowpea fields and gardens, and in clumps 

 of rank grass. In the delta region clumps of Andropogon virginicus 

 are favorite hibernating places, these dense clumps frequently growing 



