l'RANSACTIONS. COLORADO BEETLES' SUFFOLK ADVENT. BY A MEMBER.
THE jubilation with which our Members welcomed the return of the Avocet to Suffolk two or three years ago cannot be extended to hail this season's equally peaceful, not to say insidious, penetration of Leptinotarsa decimlineata, Say. Despite the widest advertisement and the Ministry's most frantic efforts, the dreaded Colorado Beetle, which has already in past years surrounded us in Essex and Cambs. and Norfolk, is at last in our midst. Members have been kept so well posted* in its history and ravages that they need not be iterated here. This year its debut by three examples took place in Nottingham crates of Lettuces from Spain on 3 April. There followed one at Littleborough near Rochdale in French Cauliflowers on 6 May ; and hundreds were windblown from France to the Jersey coast beaches on 14 May. Then it approached us : in Essex it was reported at Boreham, Hullbridge and Boxsted near Colchester, where on Potatoes the Beetle and several of its larvae occurred on 21 July. Another Beetle, with larvae, was finally detected on 26 July in Suffolk. These were upon a Potato-crop in Santon Downham, on the Norfolk border near Brandon : some two hundred of the larvae were found and the crop sprayed by officials from Cambridge. —Why should administrative Suffolk always have to fall back upon some other county in an emergency ?—This was no isolated case : by 9 August a second and a third were found. In Brandon itself, at Ling Heath farm, no less than twenty-eight imagines with many pupae were noted. Then came Kent's turn, where sixty Beetles occurred at Thorne farm in Ramsgate on 23 August, bringing outbreaks to twenty-seven this year. Again in north Suffolk, a vessel arrived on 27th at Lowestoft with a cargo of Bayonne timber, amongst which the crew en route had slain nine Beetles alleged to be of the present species. Lastly, near the other end of our County, the Daily Graphic and Ipswich paper among others announced on 30 August the discovery of a solitaire upon garden Potatoes in Trimley near Felixstow. The above genus Leptinotarsa, Clevr., pertains to the great Phytophaga group of Coleoptera that includes all Longicorns and all Chrysomelides, a fam'ly represented by some 260 British species. *Trans. supra : ii, p. clxii ; iv, p. 180 ; v, pp. lxxxvi and xci ; vi, pp. 41, 120, 219, lix.