34 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
where. This year Mr. Stirling is again 
operating about DeLand, while Mr. E. 
B. Stevens, a former partner of Mr. 
Stirling, has taken up this work at 
Lakeland and vicinity. Mr. F. P. Hen¬ 
derson, of Gainesville, Fla., has also 
done extensive spraying with fungus 
spores, and besides is headquarters for 
supplying the scale fungi. 
The recent recommendations of the 
Experiment Station to spray with in¬ 
secticides for the whitefly in October 
and November, or in April or May, 
after the adult whiteflies have quit 
swarming and the eggs have hatched, 
has been almost literally followed by 
several growers with very satisfactory re¬ 
sults. 
The writer considers this recommen¬ 
dation, which is the outcome of nearly 
four years of observation and experi¬ 
ment, perhaps the most useful result, 
next to the spore-spraying method of 
spreading the fungi, accomplished. 
But all Entomological history is not 
so glittering. Four letters were re¬ 
cently addressed to as many growers 
in a locality where, the whitefly and 
scale insects were almost literally eat¬ 
ing up the trees. The purpose of these 
letters was to encourage these growers 
to give the method of spraying for the 
young whitefly larvae a fair trial. I 
offered to give them the advantage of 
my experience per letter and person¬ 
ally. I have so far heard only from one 
man, and that after I wrote him a sec¬ 
ond letter. He then stated that I was 
too late; that his brother had already 
gone into partnership with him. 
Another bit of history which I re¬ 
cently discussed with a fellow Ento¬ 
mologist comes to mind. During the 
early part of the last decade, H. A. 
Gossard, then entomologist for the Ex¬ 
periment Station, conducted fumiga¬ 
tion experiments upon the whitefly. 
He was so unfortunate as to cause the 
dropping of some leaves during the 
progress of some of the experiments. 
Today it would appear that about the 
only recollection of Gossard in that lo¬ 
cality pertains to the fact that the 
trees dropped some of their leaves. 
Considering that the fumigation car¬ 
ried on was largely experimental, it 
could only be expected that some leaves 
would be dropped. 
During the past five years fumiga¬ 
tion for the whitefly has again been 
worked over. This time under the im¬ 
mediate direction of the Bureau of En¬ 
tomology at Washington, with the lab¬ 
oratory stationed at Orlando. This 
time the prospects for its successful 
adoption appear better. At least four 
localities have adopted it as their prin¬ 
cipal method of whitefly control. Will 
the method be lost to the State again, 
as it was in 1903? I am informed that 
only two of these localities have trained 
local men to do this work, and that the 
men in charge at the other two locali¬ 
ties were from without the State, and 
will probably not return. The conse¬ 
quence will be that these localities will 
have to learn over again the next time 
they wish to fumigate. And what will 
they do when the Whitefly Laboratory 
at Orlando has been discontinued? I 
cannot too strongly emphasize here 
the importance of training local men to 
understand the application of insecti¬ 
cidal and plant disease control methods. 
