514 
Annual Report of New York 
the spots, which appear alike upon the upper and under surfaces of 
the leaf. It would be thought there were one or more insects upon 
each leaf, to make such a multitude of these discolored spots, hut 
ordinarily, though three, four or more leaves in a place are affected, 
only one insect is found, rendering it evident that he has passed from 
one leaf to another and that all the mischief has been done by him 
alone. Each leaf is punctured some hundreds of times, the spots 
being in places so close together that they run into each other, though 
over most of the surface they are slightly separated. 
Some years these bugs become much more numerous than usual, 
and then, instead of being scattered about singly, they become gre¬ 
garious, gathering together in flocks upon particular plants or masses 
of vegetation, injuring by their punctures nearly all the leaves and 
quite destroying many of them. 
But its attacks are not limited to the leaves. It is prone to also 
foil upon the flower buds of some of our choicest flowering plants. 
To these it is most pernicious, causing the buds to wither and die. It 
is in this way that this bug does the greatest damage. Its punctures 
are so fatal to the flower buds and they perish so speedily that many 
persons suppose the buds to be poisoned by its stings. 
The dahlia (Dahlia variabilis and coccinea in all their varieties) 
appears to be the plant to which this bug is most strongly attached, 
and to which it does the greatest injury. Upon the dahlias in my 
own grounds some of them have frequently occurred ; but whenever 
one has been noticed it has been picked off and destroyed if it did 
not elude capture ; and as they have never been numerous with me I 
am unable to speak from personal observation of the manner in which 
this plant is injured by them. In the year 1858, I learned from A. 
F. Chatfield, the florist in Albany, that upon all his dahlia plants that 
year, when the first flower bud put out these bugs assembled upon 
it, puncturing and poisoning it so that it withered. Two or three 
new flower stalks would then shoot forth from the base of this one, 
the buds on which would be attacked and destroyed in the same man¬ 
ner. Others would then put out from the bases of these, to share the 
same fate. Thus it went on, the whole season through. An enormously 
broad mass of leaves and stalks, fully three feet in diameter, thus 
grew from each of the dahlia roots in his garden, without a single 
flower from all the multitude of flower buds which had thus been 
developed. D. F. Heffron, of Utica, informed me that in the sum¬ 
mer of 1864, these prettily striped yellow bugs so infested his dahlias 
.that only three or four little imperfect flowers were produced. And 
