Chinch bug

“ In single States and single seasons the damage is often frightful in extent. During some of the great chinch-bug epidemics the loss in Illinois occasioned by this one insect has amounted to over $73,000,000 a year; and in seasons not marked by an outbreak of such a great crop pest the injury is much more severe than is ordinarily supposed. ”

“ Skipping the lace bugs, red bugs, or "cotton stainers," and others, we come to a series of families that are among the worst pests of the farmer and gardener, the chinch bug, squash bug, cabbage bug and many others, the aggregate effect of whose ravages causes a loss of millions of dollars' worth of crops every year, not only in this country, but everywhere that grain, vegetables, and fruit are cultivated; and in most cases it is not the native but introduced species that does the most damage. ”

“ The family is very numerous in species, about 1400 being known; they are arranged in thirteen sub-families; we have about sixty species in Britain, nearly all small. Eremocoris lives, when immature, in the nests of the wood-ant, according to Wasmann. The family includes some notorious Insect-pests. The Chinch-bug, Blissus leucopterus, commits very serious ravages on corn and grasses in North America. ”

“ These insects are generally of a red colour, with black bands and spots.
Several species are very injurious to cultivated plants. One of the most destructive of all is Blissus leucopterus, a black insect with white fore wings, each of which is marked with a large black [70] triangular spot on the outer edge. It measures about an eighth of an inch in length. The young larva is red. In the United States this insect, which abounds to a considerable extent, is called the "Chinch Bug." ”

“ The chinch-bug is responsible for the loss of five per cent., or one bushel out of every twenty. It attacks the straw, causing the heads of wheat to fall over and wither away.
The injury done by the green-bug comes just as the wheat begins to ripen, the tiny green creatures attaching themselves in great numbers to the heads of the wheat. Other insects which prey on the wheat crop are grasshoppers, the wheat midge, cutworms and army-worms. ”

“ The bedbug is to man what the chinch bug is to grains or the squash bug to cucurbs. Like nearly all the insects parasitic on animals, however, it is degraded structurally, its parasitic nature and the slight necessity for extensive locomotion having resulted, after many ages doubtless, in the loss of wings and the assumption of a comparatively simple structure. ”

“ Bugs are all injurious to man, excepting such as are predacious, which are serviceable by destroying other insects. Many are very small; and yet their countless numbers and wonderful fecundity enable [310] them to do immense damage, as is true of the Aphides and Coccidæ, the Tingis, the Tettigonia vitis, called the Thrips by our vine-dressers; and still more so of the Chinch-bug of the Western prairies, which destroys whole crops of our most important cereals. ”

“ Being a timid little creature, the Quail seldom leaves cover to feed openly in the fields, and therefore does but little actual harm in the way of destroying grain. In fact it only takes stray kernels that otherwise might be lost. This bird is one of the few that feeds upon that unsavory insect, the chinch-bug; and the number of this pest that occasionally are destroyed by it is really astonishing. No farmer or fruit-grower should ever kill a quail himself nor allow anyone else to hunt it on his premises. ”

“ The species of the first division very generally possess the power of emitting, when disturbed or alarmed, a nauseous, bed-buggy odor, which comes from a fluid secreted from two pores, [18] situated on the under side of the metathorax. Such well-known insects as the Bed-bug and Chinch-bug belong here. The habits of the species are varied, and while some are beneficial, others are quite injurious to man. ”

“ The young have the same general appearance and habits as the adults, but they lack wings. This suborder includes many common kinds, such as the water bugs, the water striders (these seldom develop wings even in the adult stage) , the ambush bugs, and the lace bugs, as well as the stink bugs and the chinch bugs. The chief 49 pest of this group is the chinch bug, Blissus leucopterus (Say) , fig. 45. Other pests include many kinds of plant bugs, of which Lygus lineolaris (Beauvois) is shown in fig. 46. The bed bugs, another group never developing functional wings, also belong in this suborder. ”

“ It also occasionally feeds upon the chinch-bug, as can be attested by the fact that the stomach of a specimen killed near Lincoln contained in the vicinity of one thousand of these bugs. It is also a fruit-eater to the extent of about one-quarter of its entire bill of fare, but nature, not man, furnishes the supply. It takes the wild kinds in preference to those that are cultivated.
The Whippoorwill, Night Hawk, and Swifts feed entirely on insects, and must consequently be classed among the beneficial birds. ”

“ You know insects are subject to diseases.
What, Nell, you never heard of a sick bug?
Yet it seems they are sick sometimes, and certain diseases kill them. Chinch bugs are not as healthy in some places as in others. ”

“ The most characteristic feature of the bedbug is the very distinct and disagreeable odor which it exhales, an odor well known to all who have been familiar with it as the "buggy" odor. This odor is by no means limited to the bedbug, but is characteristic of most plant bugs also. The common chinch bug affecting small grains and the squash bugs all possess this odor, and it is quite as pungent with these plant-feeding forms as with the human parasite. ”

“ A large weevil (Arrhenodes septentrionalis) , which lives under the bark of the white oak, appears in June and July. The Chinch bug begins its terrible ravages in the wheat fields. The various species of Chrysopa or Lace-winged flies, appear during this month.
The Insects of July.
During mid-summer the bees and wasps are very busy building their nests and rearing their young. ”

“ Only a few days ago, I dug into an old apple-tree stump for some rotten wood to put on some of my wildflowers and uncovered a large nest of ants; within a very few minutes my pair of flickers were on the job cleaning up the ants and their pupae.
Other insect food of the flicker includes a variety of beetles, wasps, grasshoppers, crickets, mole crickets, chinch bugs, wood lice, caterpillars, grubs, and various flying insects, which it sometimes catches on the wing, darting after them like a flycatcher (Burns, 1900) . ”

“ Fig. 34.—Conorhinus megistus, the insect carrier of Schizotrypanum cruzi. (From Doflein after Chagas.)
It requires several months for the insect to go through the egg, larval and pupal stage to maturity. Some consider this bug to belong to the genus Triatoma. The insects may live for more than a year and tend to remain in the same house where they may have become infected but leave such house if it be abandoned by man. Brumpt thinks that the bedbug may also transmit the disease. ”

“ In Europe this species haunts houses for the purpose of preying upon bedbugs. Riley, in his well-known article on Poisonous Insects, published in Wood's Reference Handbook of Medical Science, states that if a fly or another insect is offered to the cannibal bug it is first touched with the antennæ, a sudden spring follows, and at the same time the beak is thrust into the prey. The young specimens are covered with a glutinous substance, to which bits of dirt and dust adhere. They move deliberately, with a long pause between each step, the step being taken in a jerky manner. ”

“ Immature specimens are rarely found indoors. It winters both in the partly grown and adult stage, often under the bark of trees or in any similar protection, and only in its nocturnal spring and early summer flights does it attack men. Marlatt states that this insect seems to be decidedly on the increase in the region which it particularly infests,—the plains region from Texas northward and westward. In California a closely related species of similar habits is known locally as the "monitor bug." ”

“ The native chinquapin, Castanea pumila, in its bush and tree forms remains as the only promising chestnut not found in the Orient. While readily inoculated by artificial means, the chinquapins, especially varieties of the northern bush forms, quite often escape natural infection, doubtless because of their small size, smooth bark, and less liability to insect attacks. ”

“ The Cinchona trees thus bored through are irremediably ruined, but there is always the hope that, as the roots remain 232sound, they may afterwards put forth new shoots. However, the appearance of this insect does not seem to be the primary cause of the disease of the trees,—on the contrary, disease is the cause of the appearance of the insect. If the other trees prove to be successfully reared, the insect will disappear, since it was convincingly proved by one of our zoologists that it had not come to the country with the Cinchona seeds and plants, but was undoubtedly indigenous to Java. ”

“ But as in the flea among flies, here we find myriads of true bugs without a vestige of wings, and others, like the cicada, with ample wings as clear and free from opacity as those of a fly. It would take more space than I have at disposal to tell precisely what a bug really is entomologically, such a diversity of forms is presented in the family. But the sucking beak, and the fact that the average bug is born a bug from the egg, instead of going through the usual transformation of larva, chrysalis, and imago, will have to suffice us [236] for the present. ”

“ Mosquitos are said not to be troublesome, but in an inner room I found curtains necessary; the house-fly is a torment to irritable skins. Fleas, and the rest of the ‘piquante population,’ are most numerous during the north-east monsoon. The bug, which was held to be an importation, is now thoroughly naturalized upon the Island; in the interior it is as common as in the cities of Egypt and of Syria, where a broken rafter will discharge a living shower. I could not, however, hear anything of the ‘Pási bug,’ which, according to Dr Krapf, causes burnings, chills, and fever. ”

“ The common bush or dwarf chinquapin, Castanea pumila, widely distributed over the Atlantic States, is not as readily infected by blight as the chestnut, many individuals under cultivation and in the wild resisting attack for an indefinite time, while the creeping species of Florida and South Georgia, C. alnifolia, appear practically immune in nature but succumb to artificial inoculation with the blight virus The smooth bark and shrubby forms of these dwarf chinquapins probably account to a very great extent for the limited damage caused by blight under natural conditions. ”

“ In bad cases the whole of the foot becomes affected. After the insect has penetrated the skin its body swells enormously and becomes a mere bag of eggs. This swelling causes active inflammation, which terminates in suppuration and the formation of open ulcers. The chigoe also attacks various animals. In addition to the common flea (P. irritans) other species infesting animals are said to attack man occasionally. As regards those degraded types of insects known as lice I can only afford space to remark that five species have been recognised as human. These are the head-louse (Pediculus capitis) ”

“ It is a dangerous thing for bugs when they are shedding their skins, which they do about four times in the course of a year; when they throw off their hard shell and have a soft coat, so that the least touch will kill them; whereas at other times they will take a strong pressure. I have plenty of bug-skins, which I keep by me as curiosities, of all sizes and colors, and sometimes I have found the young bugs collected inside the old ones’ skins for warmth, as if they had put on their father’s great-coat. ”

“ They have been captured in a number of instances while biting people, and have been brought to the writer's office for determination in such a way that there can be no doubt about the accuracy of this statement. As the story went West, bites by Conorhinus sanguisuga and Rasatus thoracicus were without doubt termed "kissing-bug" bites. With regard to other cases, the writer has known of an instance where the mosquito bite upon the lip of a sleeping child produced a very considerable swelling. Therefore he argues that many of these reported cases may have been nothing more than mosquito bites. ”

“ But you wouldn't want to do that immediately with a young tree, take all the branches up so high.
A MEMBER: Do you have any control for the stink bug on filberts?
DR. MCKAY: We haven't worked with the control of stink bug, because it is what might be classed as one of our minor problems. The damage is not so great but what we can overlook it at the present time.
DR. CRANE: In pecan and almond growing in California the effective control measure for stink bug is the elimination of the host plants on which the stink bug breeds. ”

“ Certain South American species of the family Reduviidae are disease carrying and there is evidence the conenoses in San Diego County, California, are infected with a disease-producing flagellate. Lack of large bug populations in close contact with man and ineffective transmission habits protect man in the Southwest from disease contacts. However, the site of the bug’s bite becomes inflamed, and swelling may spread over an area up to a foot in diameter. ”