Tobacco Leaf, Its Culture and Cure, Marketing and Manufacture; a Practical Handbook on the Most Approved Methods in Growing, Harvesting, Curing, Packi

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ...and includes nearly the entire tobacco-growing area of the United States. It is well known to economic entomologists that the natural increase of any insect is chiefly regulated by the abundance of its food plants. Insects which subsist upon a few species of weeds of waste ground must necessarily lead a very precarious existence, and do well if they hold their number from year to year. When such an insect changes its wild food plant for a cultivated species, the relatively almost infinite abundance of the latter causes a parallel increase of the insect, which, soon overflowing its natural boundaries, or the range it occupied before, spreads into all regions where the new host plant is cultivated. This has been the history of the Colorado potato beetle, which originally subsisted upon another solanaceous weed. Description of the Tobacco Miner.--Gelechia picipellis, Zett. General color, yellowish gray. Head and thorax paler than wings, inclining to cream color. Palpi simple, not exceeding the vertex. Primaries variegated, with a few smoky streaks and a marginal row of minute black spots at base of cilia. Wing expanse 0.45 to 0.50 inch. Length 0.20 inch. (After Miss M. Murtfeldt, 1881.) The insect belongs to the natural order Lepidoptera, sub-order of moths. Family of Teneids, of which the more important are the clothes and fur moths, and the Angoumois grain moth or "Fly weevil" Gelechia--Sitotroga--cerealella), so destructive to corn and grains in the crib. The latter species is very closely related to and greatly resembles our tobacco miner. Remedies.--None have been tried as yet. From the nature of the case, the treatment must be preventive. The parent moth deposits her eggs within the substance of the leaf or stem of the plant....