loO JOURNAL OF fSE ROYAL HOflTiCULTURAL SOCIETY. 



of egg-laying. It is sometimes necessary to abandon a nursery 

 completely if it is found to be habitually and badly attacked. A 

 remarkable treatment recently introduced in France consists in 

 infecting a few grubs with the spores of a parasitic fungus 

 {Botrytis tenella) and " dibbling " them into the attacked soil, 

 where the disease is said to spread among them. Tubes of the 

 fungus are now in the market in France ; and it is open to any- 

 one who suffers from their presence to try this highly interesting 

 remedy, the value of which has yet to be established. 



Destruction of the beetles is the method on which continental 

 foresters rely most. This is accomplished by shaking them 

 down from the foliage of young trees on to sheets placed below ; 

 large trees must have the branches shaken separately with a 

 long hooked pole. 



The best time for the work is the early morning, and care 

 must be taken to carry it out in weather which is not so cold 

 and damp that the beetles refuse to drop, nor so hot that they 

 readily fly off. They are most easily killed with boiling water, 

 and if caught in large quantity can be mixed with quicklime and 

 afterwards used as manure. 



With the larvae the only suitable method employed is that of 

 digging them out. In badly infested ground the planting of 

 Lettuce as a bait between the young trees will serve to draw them 

 off, and they may be caught under 'traps of fresh bark or cut 

 shoots stuck in the ground. 



Pine -WEEVIL. 



The worst enemy to young Conifers, either in a badly situated 

 nursery or after planting-out, is the large clumsy Pine-weevil, 

 Curculio {Hylohms) Abietis, a blackish-brown beetle of convex 

 shape, with coarsely sculptured elytra sparsely decked with 

 patches of yellow hair. The weevils lay their eggs in spring 

 and early summer, in dead but not dry Pine or Spruce-wood, 

 choosing especially the cut stumps of recently felled trees ; 

 also unbarked logs and the lower part of the stems of dead 

 standing trees. Under the bark the grubs gnaw irregular galleries 

 in the sapwood, changing at the end of these to pupje. Like 

 the grubs of all weevils, they require shelter, and will not feed 

 exposed to daylight on loose brushwood, &c. They will, how- 

 ever, flourish in the closely packed sawdust of a saw-pit, which 



