June, ’20] 
SHERMAN: GREEN CLOVER WORM 
295 
In this area, improved drainage will help the corn to grow steadily 
and will help the land operators to destroy the billbug host plants. 
The breaking on this tract was done the year before the first crop was 
planted, which was good. Summer breaking gives the quickest results 
in destroying billbug host plants. If they are completely destroyed 
before winter, any surviving billbugs will leave, and corn can safely be 
planted the following spring. Where the destruction of host plants is 
only partial, the planting of corn will be attended with such losses that 
a diversity of crops not susceptible to billbug injury, such as pumpkins, 
turnips, melons, flax, cotton and beets, might and probably would be 
more profitable. Such crops planted in rows and cultivated would 
allow as rapid destruction of the host plants as would corn. Usually 
billbug injury ceases to be serious after the second crop has been pro¬ 
duced on new land where the host plants have been abundant. These 
losses, however, may be eliminated completely or may cover several 
years, depending directly upon the time the host plants are com¬ 
pletely destroyed. 
Mr. E. G. Kelly: Have you found the larvse of this insect in 
corn? 
Mr. A. F. Satterthwait: No. The injury to corn that I have 
found was caused by the adult. 
Vice-President E. C. Cotton: The next paper is “The Green 
Clover Worm on Soy Beans,” by Franklin Sherman, Jr. 
THE GREEN CLOVER WORM (PLATHYPENA SCABRA FABR.) 
AS A PEST ON SOY BEANS 
By Franklin Sherman, Entomologist State Department Agriculture, Raleigh, N. C. 
On July 29, 1919, the farm agent of an eastern county in North 
Carolina wrote us of a worm destroying leaves of soy beans. Within 
a week complaints were coming by the dozen. Larvae were identified 
at Washington as Plathypena scabra Fabr. the Green Clover Worm, 
one of the “Snout-moths” of the family Noctuidae (broad sense), and 
we were told that it had become epidemic simultaneously from New 
England to Florida. 
Within ten days the injury was at its height, within two weeks it 
was on the decline and some fields were recovering,—but also in less 
than a week from the first complaint a preliminary survey had been 
made, and we had two temporary Field Stations in operation, one by 
the writer at Elizabeth City and the other by Mr. Leiby, assistant, at 
Terra Ceia. 
