8TATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
531 
WIREWOBHS. GRASS LANDS THEIR RESIDENCE. 
■where the land is springy and friable, barley, turnips and beets 
have generally fallen a sacrifice to wireworms, and such laud is 
most subject to their attacks. 
In all other situations than low, damp grounds, it is where lands 
have remained in grass a number of years that wireworms are 
liable to become greatly, multiplied. Says a correspondent of the 
Cultivator, 1861, p. 284 : “We seldom see a field badly troubled 
with them, that has not lain to grass some years. * * * The 
only way to prevent their infesting our farms, so far as I know, is 
to break up and seed down often, never allowing land that has 
been infested with them, or that which may be supposed to be 
well adapted for them to work in, to lay to grass longer than one 
or two years.” 
There are but few crops, moreover, that they will not attack, 
although there arc particular vegetables to which they undoubtedly 
give a preference. But this may be owing, at least iu part, to the 
larvae of different species not having exactly the same tastes. 
The plants which wireworms are known to attack, or at least 
are recorded sis attacking, are grass, Indian corn, wheat, rye, bar¬ 
ley, oats, potatoes, turnips, mangel-wurzel, cabbages, carrots, beets, 
onions, lettuces, rape, hops, strawberries, irises, pinks, carnations, 
dahlias, lobelias, and numerous other garden flowers. 
Grass appears of all kinds of vegetation to be that which is 
most attractive and palatable to wireworms. They abound alike 
iu the roots of the coarsest sedge and other wild grasses on the 
borders of marshes, and in those of our most delicate pasture 
grasses, the June and Kentucky blue grass. As has been already 
mentioned, I have met with them boring into the bulbous roots of 
the Timothy, and sending out a swarm of Elaters from the fibrous 
roots of the quack grass. They resort alike to the scanty carpet¬ 
ing of dry, rocky hills, and the luxuriant growth of rich interval 
meadows. In short, as Mr. Curtis observes, it may be received as 
an axiom, that wherever grass will grow, the wireworms may be 
found, for the roots of the various species all afford sufficient 
nourishment for their support. Pasture and meadow lauds, con¬ 
sequently, are always stocked with them. And it hence follows 
that these lauds when newly broken up often swarm with them, 
whereby the crops that we attempt to grow on these lands fall a 
prey to this pest. 
Indian corn being usually the first thing planted on lands newly 
