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He bought the spoiled acreage of his neighbors, which he cut up for the silo as yet the only one in the county adding water to help fermentation. His imported hogs seemed to justify the prices he paid for them, growing faster and rounder and fatter than any in the surrounding county. The chinch bugs might bother everyone else, but Martin seemed to be able to guard against them with fair success.
Following a heavy downpour of rain on Easter Sunday night the atmosphere at Topeka, Kansas, was filled with dust until it had the appearance of a heavy fog. The dust came from the western part of the state where severe dust storms prevailed. In western Kansas the "blowout" has been as great a source of damage to the wheat fields as the drought or chinch bugs or hot winds.
When a boat is not "plymmed," it leaks in all its seams, and is therefore looked upon as unsafe for these sub-Arctic waters by the more conservative amongst us. To stop a boat leaking you "chinch" the seams with oakum. Our fisherman sexton has just told me that "the church was right chinched last night." One by one our supplies are giving out or diminishing.
But on the whole they eyed with humorous intolerance the settlers who departed, leaving their claims as they had found them. A great blessing of the plains was the absence of vermin. I do not remember having seen a rat or a weasel on the frontier at that time, and many of the natives had never seen a potato bug or chinch bug or cockroach.
My father's world was less jocund, was indeed filled with increasing anxiety, for just before harvest time a new and formidable enemy of the wheat appeared in the shape of a minute, ill-smelling insect called the chinch bug.
It was a hard bargain, but one that Wade could afford to take up, for if the wheat were to freeze out, or if the grasshoppers should eat it, or the chinch bugs ruin it, or a hail storm beat it down into the mud, or if any of the many hatreds Stepmother Nature holds out toward those trusting souls who would squeeze a living from her hard hands if any of these misfortunes should transpire, he would be out nothing but labor, and that was the one thing he and Martin could afford to risk.
Riley, in his Second Annual Report on the Injurious Insects of Missouri, which may be considered a reasonable one, in the year 1864 three-fourths of the wheat, and one-half of the corn crop were destroyed by the chinch bug throughout many extensive districts, comprising almost the entire North-West.
However, the chinch bugs were a very important factor in discouraging wheat growing and the land has been very good for corn, especially since the tile-drainage was put in; but on the whole is it not as I told you?"
Wash, heer, never did have much more sense 'n a chinch, nohow." "What can I do for you, Mr. Hunter?" asked the man addressed, coming out. There was a decidedly sheepish look in the old man's face, and he swung the halter of the horse awkwardly to and fro. "Well, you see, it's jest this way, Westerfelt," he began, with an effort.
While many of the mites are parasitic on animals, some are known to devour the eggs of insects and other mites, thrusting their beaks into the egg, and sucking the contents. Shimer has observed the Acarus? malus sucking the eggs of the Chinch bug.
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