34 
FIRST ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 
INSECTS INFESTING THE APPLE.—On the Leaf. 
CHAPTER VII.— The Rascal Leaf-crumpler. ( Phycita nebulo, Walsh.) 
I figured and described this small moth, and the curious house in which its larva 
lives, for the first time, in the Prairie Farmer for May, 1860, (p. 308) and the description 
was subsequently reprinted in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History , 
(Vol. IX. pp. 312-3.) It infests in the northern part of Illinois both apple, crab and 
plum trees, the larva traveling about in a little crooked horn or case, and tying together 
with silken threads the terminal leaves of young twigs, inside which it feeds at its leisure. 
Frequently, in passing from twig to twig, it anchors its case by strong silken cables 
to the naked side of a limb, and in this situation it has very much the appearance of a 
piece of dry bird’s dung. It remains in this case in the larva state all through the win¬ 
ter and until the forepart of the following June ; shortly after which date it changes 
into the pupa state, from which the winged moth emerges about the middle of July. I 
formerly conjectured that there were two or more broods of this species every year, but 
I am satisfied now that there is but one. It is not preyed on by any Ichneumon fly, so 
far as I have discovered; but I have bred from it a species of the parasitic Tachina 
family, so closely resembling, both in size and coloration, the common House-fly, that 
almost any ordinary observer would be sure to mistake the one for the other. 
When this insect does not occur in extraordinary numbers, it is probably rather ben¬ 
eficial than otherwise on large trees, by operating as a summer pruning and thereby 
cheeking the exuberant growth of wood and throwing the tree to fruit. But in 1859 I 
found them so abundant on one of my apple-trees, that if I had not destroyed them, I 
believe they would have greatly injured it ; and in June 1867 I received specimens of it 
from “J. M. K.,” of Clarence, Iowa, with the statement that “it had destroyed his 
apple-crop for the last three years.” When the trees are bare in the dead of the year, 
it is a very easy thing to find the little bunches of dry leaves —tied to the twig by silken 
bands — in which the larva has hidden its case, to protect itself from the cold blasts of 
winter ; and it may then be readily picked off the tree, and destroyed by forcibly crump¬ 
ling up the whole establishment, leaves and all, between the fingers. Comparatively a 
very slight pressure will effect this; for we are dealing here not with a hard shelly 
beetle, but with a soft delicate caterpillar. Although this insect is so common in 
Northern Illinois, and I have noticed plenty of them annually for the last 10 years near 
Rock Island, and they are equally abundant, as I am assured by Mr. C. V. Riley, near 
Chicago, yet, on the most careful search, I could not discover a single specimen, even in 
the dead of the year, in the apple orchards near Cobden in South Illinois; and Mr. Riley 
tells me that he also has failed to find it there. Neither, so far as I can ascertain, does it 
occur in the Eastern States ; and most certainly it is not mentioned either by Dr. Harris 
or by Dr. Fitch. We may set it down, therefore, for the present, as an exclusively north¬ 
western species. 
INSECTS INFESTING THE APPLE. — On the Bark. 
CHAPTER VIII.— The Oyster-shell Bark-louse. ( Aspidiotus conchiformis , Gmelin.) 
There is no noxious insect existing throughout the length and breadth of the United 
States, about which more nonsense has been written and talked — concerning the Nat- 
