There are few of our insect enemies which do their destructive work more rapidly than do the cucumber beetles. Every child in the South who has left his cucumber hills unscreened knows this, for he has found them some morning literally eaten up over night by the spotted or striped yellow-green cucumber beetles.
The puzzle is, where do they come from so suddenly? It is as though they were waiting for cucumbers to come up, and this is pretty nearly true, for the adults have wintered in the leaves and rubbish of the garden and are all ready to concentrate on the plantlets in the spring.
Unlike so many pests, which are content to trouble us only during a part of their existence, this twelve-spotted cucumber beetle is our enemy all its life long, for it spends its larval life eating the roots of corn and other field crops.
It is a wide-spread pest, with many relatives quite as bad as it is, and not only does it eat up the young and defenseless cucumbers and the roots of the corn, but it is the carrier of a germ infection of a serious nature to the cucumber. My friend, Dr. Erwin F. Smith, informs me that its kind has infested large areas in the South with this disease and dashed the hopes of thousands of boys who, instead of feasting on the melons they have planted with such care, must stand helplessly by and watch the leaves and flowers wilt and the vines decay. It must be remembered that this is a winged carrier of disease and anyone who still fails to understand the speed of travel of an epidemic had better watch the cucumber beetles busy spreading this destructive germ disease. A single beetle feeding on a diseased leaf can carry on its jaws enough germs to infect every melon or cucumber plant in a neighboring field, and that, too, in a single day.
ONE OF THE SAWYERS
(Monohammus titilator, Fab.)
While standing on a street corner waiting for a street-car one day last summer my attention was attracted to this beautiful squirrel-gray creature at my feet. It was so evidently ill that, as I picked it up, I began to examine it to find out what was the matter. Clustered on its neck, out of reach of its feet or jaws were whitish bodies which evidently did not belong to its external skeleton but were probably the eggs of what I took to be some parasite whose growth within the body of the beast had brought about its pitiable condition. These are just visible between the creature’s “horns” in the photograph. It was, in other words, a sick insect.