STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
829 
MIDGE. SUMMARY VIEW OF IT. 
Iii these its native haunts it is everywhere accompanied by vast 
numbers of minute black flies resembling small ants, which are 
its parasitic destroyers. One of these deposits its eggs in the 
larva, another in the eggs of the midge, causing them to perish, 
and hereby this insect is restrained from multiplying, and is 
speedily quelled whenever it chances to become numerous. 
It was introduced upon this continent, probably in unthreshed 
wheat brought to the port of Quebec, and began to attract pub¬ 
lic notice from its destructiveness to the wheat crop in the 
northwestern part of Vermont in the year 1828. Prom thence 
it has spread itself over all the free States and Canada, as far 
west as into Michigan and Indiana, everywhere laying the wheat 
crop under contribution for its support, and rendering the culti¬ 
vation of this grain so uncertain that in all the older parts of the 
country wheat has long since ceased to be a staple product. 
This insect is a very small fly about a third the size of a mus- 
keto, which it resembles in its appearance. It is of a bright 
orange yellow color with clear glassy wings. These flies come 
abroad each year a little before the middle of June, and continue 
more than a month, laying their eggs between the chaffs of the 
wheat ears. They are most active in a moist atmosphere and 
cannot endure a dry one. Hence they are only seen on the wheat 
ears in the night time and on cloudy days. And if the last half 
of Juno be wet and showery this insect is most numerous and 
destructive; but if it be remarkably dry the wheat that year 
escapes from injury, the insect withdrawing from it, probably to 
the grass of lowland meadows and the margins of streams, in 
which to rear its young to return as they do into the wheat the 
next year. 
The eggs hatch minute footless worms or maggots which soon 
acquire a bright orange yellow color. These place themselves 
upon the soft young kernels of the grain and abstract the milky 
juiqe therefrom, whereby the kernels become shrunken and dwarf¬ 
ish. The worms get their growth in three to four weeks, when 
they are slightly less than a tenth of an inch long. When the 
straws are wet with rain, whereby they are able to adhere to 
them, they crawl down them and enter the ground, where they 
enclose themselves in minute cocoons scarcely the size of mustard 
seeds, in which they remain through the autumn and winter, and 
till ready to give out the flies the following June. 
