Abstract
IN view of their economic bearing and of the nearness of the wheat-sowing season, the data given below should be widely known, all the more that in the latest notice I have seen regarding the life-history of the insect pest concerned (Rev. Applied Entom., June, 1920, abstract of papers by R. Kleine in Zeitschr. f. angew. Entom., Berlin, 1915–16) the practical conclusions given appear to be entirely misleading. These conclusions are that “wheat should be preceded by root crops” and “it is apparently useless to attempt to grow wheat or rye on ground which has not been under cultivation for some time.” Now it is chiefly among root crops, especially potatoes, and on fallow ground that the insect elects to lay its eggs. This month, for example, in one infected area I find that the number of potential “wheat-bulb” larvæ in a particular potato-field ranges from six to twenty per square foot of surface, while the next field (pasture) has very few, and the neighbouring wheat-field, which was the sufferer last spring, has still fewer. Obviously to sow wheat on infected ground means laying up progressive trouble for the future. The disease has done much damage this year in the East of Scotland and elsewhere, and is evidently spreading, in this locality at any rate. Larvæ obtained from infected wheat were allowed to pupate in the laboratory here, and the flies which hatched out (Hylemyia coarctata, vide Theobald's “Agricultural Zoology,” 1913, p. 242) were kept until they laid their eggs. (Two of them still survive, though the field Hylemyias are all apparently dead.) The distribution of the eggs in nature was then studied (so far as time allowed) by a method permitting accurate enumeration.
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GEMMILL, J. Wheat-bulb Disease. Nature 106, 148 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/106148b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106148b0
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