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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 14

Prevention

Prevention.

Spots where there are long inter-twisted herbage and weed growth, wet ditches, the wet sides of hedgerows, and damp headlands, undrained meadows, and marshes, are congenial habitations of the Crane flies. These being their head-quarters and chief breeding places, an obvious means of prevention is to keep ditches well brushed and cleaned out, to abolish hedgerows where possible, or to keep them well and closely trimmed up, also to drain wet land. Wetness and decay, as is affirmed by Miss Ormerod, Curtis, Taschenberg, and Kaltenbach,* are natural to them, and long immersion in water does not destroy their eggs.

In very many instances the attack of Crane flies upon field crops is where these follow clover or artificial grasses, whose herbage has served as shelter for the eggs. The necessity of keeping clover and other leys down close before they are ploughed cannot be too strongly urged, not only as a means of prevention against crane flies, but also against many other injurious insects. However well ploughed, however well pressed down the land may be, some eggs will be left in circumstances in which they can be hatched out if there are long stalks and much herbage. It is also important to plough leys early in order that the eggs may be buried deeply, so that they may be prevented from changing into larvæ. It goes almost without saying that page 25 weed growth in fields serves equally as a harbour for the eggs. The clean and careful fanner, as a rule, is not so liable to attacks from insects as he who is slovenly As the eggs and the grubs of these flies are without doubt carried out on to the land in farm yard manure it is very desirable to keep old mixens clear from weeds, and to turn mixens that have laid some time three weeks or so before they are carted out, that the eggs and grubs may be destroyed by the renewed heating. Old mixens are a very fertile source of insect attacks of many other kinds. Weeds should not be allowed upon them. They should never be carried out when their heat has been long exhausted. But old mixens are altogether a mistake from all points of view.

* Die Pfanzenfeinde aus der Klasse der Insekten, von. J. H. Kaltenbach.