36 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
preventative measure against the ravages 
of the white fly will go to the legislative 
committee with power to act. If any 
enactment is to be had at the present ses¬ 
sion of the legislature, no doubt the special 
legislative committee, which has been 
heretofore appointed at this session, will 
be of service to the committee in this re¬ 
gard. 
COTTON BUG. 
Dr. Richardson—I have been very 
much interested in these papers. I desire 
to call the attention of the society to an 
insect that I have so far been unable to 
find in any of our society literature, 
scientific or otherwise. He is a 
bug and is, I have lately learned, 
known to the • cotton planter as 
the cotton bug—and if any of you have 
never met him, I hope you never may. 
In markings and color he is beautiful, 
brown, green, red and gold with a diamond 
in the center of his back, his shape is some¬ 
thing like a common pumpkin bug but not 
so large. In numbers and rapacity he is a 
devastator. His appearance is sudden. I 
first n^et him in alxnit 1892 I think it was, 
with very disastrous results as I lost some 
10,000 or 12,000boxes of oranges through 
his depredations in the course of a few 
days’ time. I thought, as he had not ap¬ 
peared again, that I was free from his 
kind, and had nearly forgotten all about 
him until last fall, when my manager tele¬ 
phoned me he had found a strange bug on 
my tangerines. I went over and found the 
ground, the fruit and trees literally cover¬ 
ed with the bugs so thickly in fact that 
you could scarcely see the fruit—there 
were millions of them—^and I lost probably 
40 or 50 boxes of tangerines. Having met 
him before, I determined upon heroic ef¬ 
forts to get rid of him. After trying 
almost every insecticide known without 
success, I finally made a carbolinium whale 
oil soap mixture, rather as an experiment 
than anything else, knowing the virtue of 
the carbolinium on account of the percent¬ 
age of carbolic acid it contains. The mix¬ 
ture or emulsion was made of one quart of 
carbolinium to seven pounds of whale oil 
soap boiled and stirred into three gallons 
of water, pouring the same into about 
fifty gallons of water, making a solution 
with which I sprayed the fruit and leaves. 
To my agreeable surprise this completely 
routed and destroyed Mr. Cotton Bug. I 
mention this for what it may be worth. 
Mr. McCarty.—^^The gentleman’s expe¬ 
rience is very interesting and valuable. 
The bug he has described, is what is 
known as the common cotton stainer. 
They are a very prolific pest, but I think 
Dr. Richardson might modify his numbers 
to myriads instead of millions. The thanks 
of the society are due the doctor for his 
solution, the component parts of which 
the society will in all probability profit by 
remembering. 
Dr. Richardson—^Myriads may be all 
right, but anyone having experience with 
cotton bugs will agree to millions. Mod¬ 
ern scientists tell us that microbes repro¬ 
duce by binary division at the rate of 
sixteeen or more millions from a single 
specimen in twenty-four hours. The cot¬ 
ton bug will in the old-fashioned way of 
egg and hatching, it almost seems, do 
pretty nearly as well. I have a neighbor 
who examined his grove in the morning 
and found not a bug, but at four o’clock 
in the afternoon his large seedling trees 
were covered with them, and by the next 
day he had lost some four or five thousand 
boxes. This was Mr. Rogers, of Suther¬ 
land. 
