8 
INSECTS INJURIOUS TO SUGAR CANE. 
have signified their intentiou of experimenting with this substance the 
present season, and one sowed a quantity of lime with his seed cane 
as he planted it last fall, with the idea of keeping the beetles away, 
but it seems probable that its influence will have become dissipated by 
the time the beetles make their appearance. It will be best to postpone 
the planting of the infested portions of the field until spring, and then 
it is possible that the sowing of lime with the seed may prove of benefit. 
To experiment with lime upon stubble cane, it seems to us that it should 
be sown as soon as the cane begins to appear above ground. 
THE SUGAR-CANE BORER. 
( Ohilo mccharalis, Fabr. [ Diatraea sacchari Guildiugj.) 
Order, Lepidoptera ; family, Pyralidae. 
Boring into the stalk of sugar cane and making a longitudinal burrow from 2 to 0 
inches long, a white cylindrical larva, over an inch long when full-grown, transforming 
within the burrow, aud eventually becoming a light-brown moth, expanding about 
an inch aud a quarter. 
HISTORY. 
For many years the sugar-cane borer has proved very 
destructive to cane in the West Indies. Several of the 
earlier writers upon cane culture mention its ravages, 
which appear to have been particularly marked in the 
Windward Islands, especially in Guadaloupe, in 1785 and 
178G. The borer moth was first scientifically described 
by Fabricius, in 1793, as Pyralis 
scacharalis (Ent. Syst, III., ii, 338), 
and was afterwards redescribed by 
Rev. Lansdown Guilding, a resi- 
dent of Saint Vincent, Windward 
Isles, as Diatraea sacchari, in an 
essay upon the habits of the borer, 
tor which he was awarded the 
Ceres gold medal of the London 
Society of Arts (Trans. Soc. Arts, 
XLVI, 143). About 1850 the borer appeared in Mauri- 
tius, and was the occasion for an article upon its habits 
by Westwood, in the Gardiners’ Chronicle (1856, p.453), 
and which is the best of the very few published accounts. 
In the United States the borer appears to have at- 
tracted but little attention, aud we cannot find that any 
articles have been published upon it. That it has existed 
in Louisiana, however, for many years is beyond doubt. Dr. J. B. Wil- 
kinson, of Plaquemines Parish, states that in 1857 the borers were very 
