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Even here, however, the total loss is very great. Almost equally important is the damage wrought by the chinch-bug, which is also one of the greatest pests in wheat and oats. Every year in different sections of the country, bill-bugs, wire-worms, cutworms, cornstalk borers, locusts, grasshoppers, corn plant-lice and other insects, destroy millions of bushels of corn.
Caterpillars, plant-lice, bugs, and insect pests of all kinds were numerous, and did much harm to my garden; but the greatest plague of all were the leaf-cutting ants, and I had to wage a continual warfare against them.
Even then, no doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet. Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personæ, a couple of small brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green 'plant-lice, or 'blight, or aphides.
A ferocious creature, the grub of the Hemerobius, disembowels plant-lice, making of their skins a battle-dress, covering its back with the eviscerated victims, "as the Red Indian ties about his loins the tresses of his scalped enemies." Caterpillars are surrounded by the implacable voracity of the Carabidae:
This "honey-dew" was sweet, and in great demand among such insects as had tastes that way; in fact, the enterprising ants who are always a decade ahead of everybody else were, in one place, building mud sheds over the said herds of plant-lice to prevent their precious "honey-dew" being exploited by others.
As eggs, they are, of course, harmless, and during the chrysalis state they lie perfectly inactive and are harmless, but many of them are very destructive when they are worms or larvæ, others do most injury in the full-grown state. The insects that man has most reason to dread are: Plant-lice, tiny insects with soft bodies, usually green.
Here dwelt mine host who had issued the invitations and spread the feast, the limb for about a foot space being surrounded by a colony of aphides, or plant-lice, from whose distilling pipes the rain of sweet honey-dew had fallen ceaselessly upon the leaves below.
It does not deserve protection, for it eats the buds and blossoms of fruit trees and does little to compensate for all the harm done. Its best habit is eating woolly plant-lice. No article on birds would be complete that does not dwell on the enormous destruction of birds for trimming hats.
Just now, while I am at work on the last pages of this book, comes an inquiry, which I answer here because the subject of it is one of general interest: "Every spring our Crimson Rambler Roses are infested with thousands of green plant-lice. The new shoots will be literally covered with them.
Lady-bird beetles destroy large numbers of plant-lice, and the Asiatic lady-bird has been found to be the natural destroyer of the San Jose scale. These little insects are now being hatched in this country, and it is hoped through them to stamp out the pest. A number of larger insects prey on the smaller ones.
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