The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 3 (June 1, 1935)
The Way of a Wireworm
The Way of a Wireworm.
Wireworms demand a more subtle system of insecticide. Wireworms, as their name implies, have their own telegraphic code of inter-communication. They are too wiry to be readily destroyed even by wireless, so the
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scientific gardener resorts to ruse to rid his ridges of these telegraph boys of the insect world. He simply digs a tunnel under the fence and tacks a telegram above it, reading, “Come at once. Mother sick.” The wire-worms, obeying their age-old instinct of maternal obedience, dash through the tunnel into the neighbour's garden and, if he is scientific too, he passes them on until they either perish in the Sahara Desert or die of exhaustion en route.