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Forbes, S. A. — The Cliincli Bug. (An address delivered before a 

 meeting of farmers at Belleville, 111., Sept. 11, 1888, and re- 

 ported for the Belleville Weekly Advocate, Sept. 28, 1888.)* 



The statistician of the U. S. Department of Agriculture esti- 

 mates the loss in this State last year due to the chinch^ bug at 

 about S12,000,000, a sum large enough to furnish bread to every 

 man, woman, and child in Illinois for an entire year. Recent 

 efforts at cooperation among farmers an encouraging sign, although 

 "the best time for action passed four years ago, v^^hen it became 

 evident that a chinch-bug outbreak was impending;" but demon- 

 strate now that you can and will control this pest and you will 

 add at least twenty per cent, to the value of every farm in South- 

 ern Illinois. Points in life history are given; mode of hiber- 

 nation, favorite food plants, those it does not attack, etc. The 

 empty crusts of the last moult are often mistaken for dead 

 chinch bugs. The old hibernating bugs are nearly all dead by the 

 middle of June, and the winged form of the new generation begins 

 to appear about July 1, It is commonly about sixty days after 

 the laying of the egg before the winged insect appears, but as the 

 eggs are laid at intervals during three or four weeks the bugs 

 from the first are several weeks old when the latest laid eggs are 

 hatching. The spring generation makes its way, chiefly on foot, 

 from ripening wheat to oats or corn, the last of the brood getting 

 wings in August. The eggs for the second generation are laid 

 behind the sheaths of the leaves at the base of the corn stalk or 

 in the ground about the roots. Three broods are said to occur 

 in the latitude of North Carolina, and a few possible examples 

 of a third brood have been noticed in Southern Illinois, jbut, 

 practically, the insect is two-brooded in this State. The varying 

 numbers of the chinch bug are chiefly due to climatic differences. 

 Their bird and insect enemies are insignificant, but they are sub- 

 ject to two fatal contagious diseases, one of them now apparent 

 in Clinton and adjacent counties. "Their enormous numbers under 

 favorable conditions are accounted for by their high rate of mul- 

 tiplication, a single female having the capacity to give origin dur- 

 ing a single season, if all things are favorable, to about 90,000 

 progeny. Two hundred hibernating bugs may therefore prorluce 

 18,000,000 during the succeeding summer,— enough, if placed end 

 to end, to make a file [ twenty- ]eight miles in length." The proper 

 economic procedure is first pointedly intimated by an account of the 

 measures to be employed if one would raise chinch bugs successfully 

 and keep them up to the highest level of multiplication ; and the 

 subject is then dealt with directly by giving a practical account 

 of remedial and preventive measures. The hibernating season, the 

 time of attack on wheat in spring, and that of midsummer migra- 

 tion from breeding ground, said to be critical periods in life his- 

 tory of insect. Fire is the means of attack in the first instance, 

 and late in fall or early in spring the torch should be carried to 



• *This address was also made at Robinson, Crawford Co., at Louisville, Clay Co., and at Mt. 

 rmel, Wabash Co. 



