| Show OF INTEREST TO WEBER COUNTY the report of the secretary of agriculture made public this morning stamps james wilson as one of the most untiring and intelligent workers 0 all the cabinet officers his control of the agricultural interests of the united states has been marked by many important moves on behalf of the farmers of this country and under his guidance important and far reaching discoveries have been made from the utilization of which millions ot dollars in benefits havo accrued to the agriculturists A part of his report to which special attention should be given by the or of weber county is that dealing with san jose scale for some time our fruit grow ers have labored under the delusion that the scale cannot DO annihilated but secretary wilson treats the problem as one which has been solved he says the native home of the san jose scale was found by one of the experts of the bureau to bo northern china and from that point he secured specimens of a ladybird known as callo corus which were brought to washington propagated in numbers and sent out to different portions of the united states infested by the san jose scale the infect does not seem to do well in the northern states but has become established in the southern states it Is and will probably maintain itself and become more and more useful every year the lime sulphur and salt wash and other remedies for the san jose scale however have proved BO efficient and aro so cheap as to be practically universally adopted and tills adoption takes away the possibility of a very rapid multiplication of the imported ladybird during this period many of important parasitic and predatory insects have been made to foreign countries where it was thought they would be of assistance in warfare against injurious insects the most striking instance of the value of this work occurred in when the orange groves of portugal were threatened with extinction by the ravages of the walto scale the officials of the portuguese department of agriculture appealed for assistance and through the cooperation of the stata board of horticulture of california specimens tot noalus the ladybird enemy of the white scale imported from australia into california by ah employee of the bureau some years previously sly ivere secured tho entomologist had those specimens carried in the refrigerating compartment of a steamer to portugal the success of the experiment vaa almost immediate and very great and the scale was practically annihilated in a little more than a year parasites of Am oilcan scale have been and are still being sent to the official entomologists of italy france and other countries and good results are constantly lining secured no results however have as yet proved as striking as those in portugal just described carguil investigations havo been made into the and life histories of very many species of injurious scale insects and tho bureau baa built up what is probably the largest collection of abeso insects in existence its publications on the life histories of these insects are standard and its especial publications on ho san jose acala ara the basis of all of our knowledge of this important pest the work of the bureau on remedies tor scales has been very extensive and for the past eight years has formed an important part of the output of tha bureau nearly all of the standard remedies against this class of are the result of these labors |
