2jS 
Beetles 
the familiar Colorado potato-beetle being one of the largest species in the 
family; the body is short, more or less oval in outline, strongly convex above; 
the head small, much narrower than the prothorax, and with the antennae 
inserted widely apart. The adults walk slowly about on the plants on which 
they feed, and when disturbed usually fold up the legs and fall, inert, to the 
ground. However, they sometimes take readily to wing. The eggs are 
usually laid in little groups on the food-plants, and the larvae, rather broad, 
thick, and roughened, crawl about, exposed, on the leaves which they eat. 
Sometimes they eat only the soft tissue of the leaf, skeletonizing it; some mine 
inside the leaf, and a few burrow into stems. Most, however, eat ragged 
holes in the leaves, and, if feeding on cultivated plants, do great injury. 
Indeed there are perhaps more beetle enemies of our crops, shade-trees, and 
ornamental plants in this family than in any other in the order. 
The Colorado potato-beetle, Doryphora io-lineata (Fig. 383), with 
robust, oval, cream-colored body, and elytra with five longitudinal black 
stripes on each, is a notorious Chrysomelid whose gradual extension or 
migration eastward from its native home in Colorado 
created much excitement forty years ago. Its native 
food-plant is the sand-bur, Solatium rostratum, a 
congener of the potato, but after 1850 it began to find 
its way to the potato-plants of the early settlers; by 
1859 it had reached Nebraska, 1861 Iowa, in 1864 
and 1865 it crossed the Mississippi and gradually 
extended eastward until 1874, when it reached the 
Atlantic Ocean. Finally it obtained a partial foothold 
in Europe, creating great consternation there, but it has 
never got to be a serious pest across the ocean. The orange-red eggs are 
laid on the leaves, and the larvae are curious humpbacked soft-bodied crea¬ 
tures with black head and Venetian-red body. They crawl down and bur¬ 
row into the ground to pupate. There are three generations a year in the 
latitude of St. Louis, the beetles of the last brood crawling underground 
to hibernate. 
The common asparagus-beetle, Crioceris asparagi, red, yellow, and black, 
gnaws holes in young asparagus-heads, and the brown slug-like larvae which 
hatch from oval blackish eggs laid on the heads also eat them. The three- 
lined Lema, Lema trilineata , of similar shape, but yellow with three longi¬ 
tudinal black stripes on each elytron, is common on “ground-cherries.” 
Their larvae have the curious habit of covering their backs with their own 
excrement. Elm-trees in the East are often badly infested with the imported 
elm-leaf beetle, Galerucella luteola (Fig. 384), a common European pest. 
It first got to this country in 1834 and is now “in all probability responsible 
for more ruined elm-trees in the Hudson River valley than all other destruc- 
Fig. 383. — The Colo¬ 
rado potato - beetle, 
Doryphora io-lineata. 
(Twice natural size.) 
