Evening star., 1935-11-03
Magazine Section


by the federal and state auth horities is
quickly effective, this disease threatens
to wipe out our American elms as
speedily as the chestnut blight elm
mated that noble tree a few years ago.
Most of our 5000 insect pests are
natives, like the tent caterpillars of
our trees and the army worms of our
grain fields. but some of the more
pernicious despoilers are aliens. Thus,
in single year of the World War
there appeared for the first time on
these shores the European corn-borer
and the Japanese beetle - two un-
wanted visitors that have since cost
this country many millions of dollars.
The corn-borer showed up first in
New York in 1916. unwittingly
brought over by some transatlantic
ship. Year after year it extended its
domain, and now is in the Middle
West. The Japanese beetle was first
discovered in America near Phila-
delphia. 1t has steadily spread north
ward and southwark and last summer
thirteen states, from Maine to Vir-
ginia, were cooperating with the
federal government in carefully
planned program Of quarantine and
destruction aimed to bring the multi
plying aliens under control. The
Japanese beetle feeds on fruit trees,
shade trees and shrubs; it greedily
strips off foliage, bloom and fruit,
and unless speedily cubed it may
become national menace.
Every two or three years some new
bug slips through the rigid plant quar-
antine and adds new variety to our
list of despoilers. A banner year was
1920. which brought in five - the
Asiatic beetle. the satin moth, the
camphor scale. the new oriental beetle
and the Mexican bean beetle. This
aforementioned pest appeared sud-
denly in Alabama. and in fifteen years
it has spread north to Canada and
east to the Atlantic seaboard. Beans
are at premium wherever these soft,
yellow little bugs take the field.
The city dweller has only faint
conception of the reality and in
tensity of the landsman's struggle
against insects, but the city man pays
his dollars to support it year after
year he pays the insect war-tax.
I'VE may think that five cents is
cheap for a loaf of bread, but if there
were no insect pests of wheat. the
cost would be -four cents" points out
A. l.. Melander. biologist of the Col
lege of the City of New York. when
we pay five cents for an apple, we
should remember that one cent of this
goes for the spraying which alone
made it possible for that apple to
appear on the market"
Spraying is almost as indispensable
to American agriculture as hoeing
but this was not true fifty years ago
The whole art of warfare against the
insects is an American development
which followed upon train of ofevents
beginning in Massachusetts, in 1868.
In that year an amateur entomolo-
gist brought in some specimens of the
gypsy moth from Europe. He had an
idea that the foreigner might be
crossed with native moth to produce
silk-worm, and was in the midst of
these experiments in Boston suburb
when one of his precious gypsies es-
capped. The event did not seem serious
One more critter in the vast domain of
North America was small item.
But such a critter! Within a few
years the descendants of that es-
capped gypsy were teeming in the Mas
sachusetts woods their caterpillars
were eating ALMOST everything except
the evergreens. and their moths were
flying into new territory, planting
more eggs. extending the area of de-
struction. Massachusetts awoke to the
fact that an enemy was in its midst.
Laws were passed, fundsvot ted, studies