346 REPORT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENTOMOLOGY OF THE 
tions. The experience of recent years, however, has shown that 
the real problem is not the extinction of the San José scale, as 
this is evidently an impossibility, but its control. Any wash or 
other treatment, therefore, designed to be used as a remedy 
for the scale should be judged on this basis. 
In the experiments herein reported various washes were used. 
At the close of each series a summary is given, and hence it 
is unnecessary to go into detail here. The principal experiments 
were with the lime-sulphur-salt wash. The facts that the experi- 
mental orchards were well distributed over the State, and that, 
with the exception of the Long Island orchard, the wash was 
subjected to unusually severe tests of washing rains soon after 
its application, add materially to their value. 
The laboratory experiments to determine the nature of the 
action of the wash upon the scales bear out the conclusions 
indicated by the orchard experiments, namely, that the wash 
kills the scales in two ways; directly through its soluble com- 
pounds and probably very soon after coming in contact with 
them, thus acting as a contact poison; and indirectly through its 
slowly soluble or insoluble compounds by forming a crust which 
apparently smothers the young insects, often preventing their 
escape from beneath the mother scale, or by preventing the 
active larve that have been produced by females that escaped 
being hit by the spray from finding a suitable lodging place upon 
the bark. The importance of the crust formed by the precipi- 
tates is an argument in favor of the liberal amount of lime, as 
the excess of lime aids materially in the formation and stability 
of the crust and with the other precipitates delays the washing 
away of the soluble compounds. 
The experiments further indicate that the lime-sulphur-salt 
wash, or a lime-sulphur wash, may be combined with a solution 
of copper sulphate, forming bordeaux mixture, and thus act as 
both an insecticide and fungicide. It should be applied a short 
time before the buds burst in the spring, a desirable time for 
the first treatment with the bordeaux mixture. This is one of 
the most important features of the treatment with this wash, as 
it does away with the necessity of a special spraying apparatus 
and a separate treatment for the scale. 

