These insects (for blight, too, is said to be an insect) are very destructive to the Tea plants. The cricket, however, only injures it when quite young, so we will consider that little pest first.
When Tea seed germinates, and the young seedling is 2 or 3 inches high, the cricket delights to cut the stem and carry, or try to carry, the two or three green leaves attached to the upper part into its hole. Even after seedlings are planted out, if the stems are slender, it cuts them. To the young seedlings, in nurseries or planted “at stake,” they often do great harm, killing in some places one-third or so.
It is much easier to prevent their ravages in nurseries than in this latter case, simply because the spot in which they must be sought and destroyed is circumscribed in the one, almost unlimited in the other.
Only one thing can be done. Employ boys (they soon get clever enough at the work) to hunt for their holes and dig them out. The holes are minute, but run down a long way. The only plan to follow them is to put in a thin pliable stick and remove the soil along it. On getting to the bottom of the stick, if it is not the bottom of the hole, you repeat the operation till you do get to the bottom, and there you will generally find the cricket.
Early in the morning they can be often found and caught outside their holes. The boys employed should be paid for them by the number they catch. They can be placed alive and brought to the factory in a hollow bamboo, and then killed in some merciful way.
When once a Tea plant has got a stem as thick as a thick pencil no cricket can hurt it.
They are much worse in some places than others, and in my experience I have found them worse on low lands.
The white ant is a much more formidable enemy than the cricket. They do (as all planters know) attack and destroy living bushes.[28] Whether they first attack some small dead portion or not is a question, but practically it does not signify the least, for if they do they manage to find such in about one-third of the trees in a garden. Beginning with the minute dead part they kill ahead of them as they go, and will, eventually, in many cases, if left alone, kill the largest trees.
They have a formidable enemy in the small black ant which exists in myriads, and kills the white ant whenever the latter is not protected by the earthen tunnels he constructs. In many places so great is the pest that, did this small black ant not exist, I believe no Tea Garden could stand.
From the close of the rains to the cold weather is the worst time for white ants, and the time the planter should guard particularly against their ravages. At that time if he examines his trees closely he will very likely find white ants on a quarter of the whole.