THE HESSIAN-FLY: 
ITS RAVAGES, HABITS, AND MEANS OF PREVENTING ITS INCREASE. 
INTRODUCTION. 
Next to the Rocky Mountain Locust, the Cotton-worm and Chinch- 
bug, the Hessian-fly is at present the most destructive of our nox¬ 
ious insects. It attacks wheat, our most important agricultural pro¬ 
duct, and at times has been so abundant as to cause farmers to 
abandon the culture of this grain over large sections of the Union. 
While the fly has been well known and destructive for about a cen¬ 
tury, the vast extension within a decade of years of the wheat-growing 
area of the West, and the corresponding prevalence of the fly in the 
Northwestern States, together with its wide-spread destructiveness, 
has given fresh interest and importance to this pest. Moreover, the 
cultivation of wheat in the New England States, where, about twenty 
years ago, it was abandoned on account of this fly and the Wheat 
Midge, has been resumed in part, so that the dissemination over the 
the wheat area of the United States of the known facts in regard 
to its habits and modes of doing injury seems necessary. This area, 
as seen in part by the map* appended to this Bulletin, which has 
been compiled from Walker’s Statistical Atlas, embraces all of the 
United States North of the 35th parallel of latitude and east of the 
93d meridian, with the addition of tracts in Dakota, Montana, Colo¬ 
rado, New Mexico and Utah, as well as in California, Oregon and 
Washington Territory. These last named wheat areas were not 
mapped by General Walker, and have been omitted on the present 
map, since the Hessian-fly is not known to exist west of Eastern 
Kansas.+ 
. *Taken from a report on the Rocky Mountain Locust and other insects now injuring, or 
likely to injure^ field and garden crops in the Western States and Territories. By A* S 
fh a e C Te?ritories Fr ° m thG Eeport for 1870 of Hayden’s United States Geological Survey of 
+The map is necessarily omitted. C. T. 
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