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Updated: May 27, 2025
The Syrphus fly, or Aphis eater, deserves more than the passing notice which we bestow upon it. It frequents flowers. Larva of Rat-tailed Fly. 78. We will not describe at length the fly, as the admirable drawings of Mr. Emerton cannot fail to render it easily recognizable.
Sir John Lubbock found that his yellow ants carried the winter eggs of a species of aphis into their nest, and there took great care of them. In the spring, the eggs hatched out; and the ants actually carried the young aphides out of the nest again, and placed them on the leaves of a daisy growing in the immediate neighbourhood. They then built up a wall of earth over and round them.
These are all cases of non-sexual multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with that little green insect, the Aphis or blight, as it is called.
Flowers would not Blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their cone demned caps, without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with monstrous protrusions through their very centres, something that looked like a second bud pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces and cabbages would not head; radishes knotted themselves until they looked like centenerians' fingers; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help order the whole attempt at vegetation.
The aphis I find no difficulty in keeping down by the use of Nicoticide a very strongly concentrated extract of the nicotine principle of tobacco. This should be diluted with water, as directed on the cans or bottles in which it is put up, and applied to all parts of the bush with a sprayer. Do not wait for the aphis to appear before beginning warfare against him.
Cooper cast the blame upon the fogs; whilst Professors Lindley, Playfair, and Kane were busy with their tests, and retorts, and alembics; and whilst others again microscope in hand were in active pursuit of the Aphis vastator, or Thrips minutissima, a not inconsiderable class of persons, departing widely from all such speculations, discovered, beyond all doubt, that Popery was the true cause of the potato blight.
Among the many varieties that do serious damage are the black olive scale, plum scale, hickory scale, locust scale, frosted black scale, red oak scale, the cottony maple scale, greedy scale and oyster shell scale. The woolly aphis injures the roots of our fruit trees; the trunk and limb borers, the peach tree borer, the apple borer, all stand ready to assail the life of the entire tree.
I am going to dig them out and plant in their places other apple trees on woolly aphis-proof root. Will it be necessary to use measures to exterminate the woolly aphis in the old roots or their places in the ground before planting new trees in the places of the removed trees? It is not necessary to undertake to kill aphis in the ground when you are planting apple trees on resistant roots.
The common brown garden-ant, one of the darkest skinned among our English races, 'devotes itself principally to aphides which frequent twigs and leaves'; especially, so far as I have myself observed, the bright green aphis of the rose, and the closely allied little black aphis of the broad bean.
New leaves are produced one after another, as fast as material can be supplied for their nutrition, and each of these new leaves is known to be a separate individual, just as much as the individual aphis. Thus a year's cycle of the plant-lice exactly answers to the life-history of an ordinary annual.
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