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Bugs, Cicadas, Aphids, and Scale-insects 
over the United States and in Canada, but the great losses occasioned by 
it occur mostly in the corn-growing states of the Mississippi Valley, where 
it has been known as a pest since 1823. I have seen great corn-fields in 
this valley ruined in less than a week, the little black and white bugs mass¬ 
ing in such numbers on the growing corn that the stalk and bases of the 
leaves were wholly concealed by the covering of bugs. The chinch-bug 
when adult is about inch long, blackish with the fore wings semi-trans¬ 
parent white and with a conspicuous small trian¬ 
gular black dot near the middle of the outer margin. 
The very young are red, but become blackish or gray 
as they grow older. The bug is injurious in all 
stages, young, half grown, and adult. The life- 
history, in Kansas, is as follows: The eggs are laid 
in the spring (from middle of March to middle of 
May) by bugs which have hibernated in the adult 
stage. They are laid a few at a time, perhaps five 
hundred in all by each female. The young “ red- 
bugs” begin work in the wheat-fields, and usually 
p IG 2Q ~_ The c hinch- remain in the wheat until harvest (last of June to 
bug, Blissusleucopterus. middle of July), when the destructive host moves into 
size 1 ) 6 tim6S natural the fields of young and growing corn. It requires 
about six weeks for the maturing of the bugs. 
The adults now pair and the cycle of a new generation begins. The 
perfect insects of this generation are those which pass through the winter 
and lay the eggs the following spring for the next year’s first brood. It 
is highly probable if not certain that a third brood often appears in Kansas. 
The chinch-bug, though winged, uses its powers of flight but little, and its 
migrations from wheat- to corn-fields in July are usually on foot. The wings 
are used to some degree at pairing-time. 
The remedies for chinch-bug attacks include the gathering together in 
winter of all rubbish, old corn-leaves, dead leaves, etc., in which the old bugs 
hibernate, and burning it, which will destroy many parent bugs, thereby largely 
lessening the spring brood. Disputing the entrance of the bugs into the 
field, when migrating on foot, by plowing furrows around the field and 
pouring coal-tar or crude petroleum into these moats, is often effective. 
There are several natural remedies, namely, the attacks of predaceous insects, 
as aphis-lions, ladybird-beetles, and others, and the attacks of some birds, 
as the common quail. Most effective of all, however, is the rapid spread 
.in a crowded field of a parasitic fungus, Sporotrichum globulijerum, which 
kills the bugs by the wholesale. This fungus cannot grow rapidly except 
in moist warm weather, and the bugs thrive especially in dry weather. So 
the rapid spreading and effective killing by this disease depends on favorable 
