830 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
HESSIAN FLY. REMEDIES. 
their own sustenance in addition to what is abstracted for their 
nourishment by the insects which invade them. To elude this 
fly, late sowing is one of the most easy and successful expedients 
that can be resorted to, and the one most fully sanctioned by 
universal experience. About the last of September is probably 
as late as it will be judicious in our climate to defer sowing 
wheat, and this will usually insure it against injury from this 
insect; tor though when it appears above ground the season for 
the fly to deposit its eggs may not in some years be entirely 
past, it will be rare for a number of these sufficiently large to be 
perceptibly injurious, to be then laid. Where the soil is of but 
medium fertility, a resort to some of the hardier varieties of 
wheat, which are known to be in a measure fly-proof, will be 
advisable. 
In my essay upon this insect, published in the Transactions of 
the State Agricultural Society for the year 1846, pp. 316-316 is 
given a full account of its history, habits and remedies, to which 
the reader is referred for numerous details, which I have not 
thought it necessary to repeat in this place. At the time that 
Essay was written, in the autumn of 1845 and the spring of 
1846, this insect had suddenly become quite numerous through 
all the district where I reside. But after harvest, in the stubble 
of the wheat fields, almost every infested and swollen straw was 
noticed as being perforated by parasites which had escaped from 
it, and the depredations of the insect abruptly ceased. But, in 
sweeping with a net in fields of winter wheat at any time in May 
or June, I continued to find some of the flies, till within a few 
years past it appears to have wholly vanished from my vicinity. 
I therefore have had no opportunity to make any recent obser¬ 
vations upon this insect, and in the foregoing account, what is 
stated of parasites is about the onl}'' important matter which I 
have been able to add to what had previously been communicated 
to the Society. 
8. Joint-worm fly, Eurytoma Tritici , Fitch. (ITymenoptera. Chalcididso.) 
Plato 1, fig 1. 
Hard and wood-liko swellings on the wheat stalks, mostly at tho lower joints, retarding 
their growth and causing many of them to become angularly bent orelbowod; those swellings 
having a number of small cavities in the substanoo of tho sheath and sometimes in that of 
the central stalk, each cavity containing a small yellowish-whito maggot which remains in 
tho straw through tho winter and becomes ohanged to a four-wingod fly which the fore part 
of May perforates a small hole through the straw and escapes therefrom; this fly 0.12 long, 
and jet black with pale dull yellow knees, feet and anterior shanks. 
