Chinch-Bug
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an insect noted for its destructive effects in grain fields. The adults are blackish with white wing covers. Six of these bugs placed end to end would scarcely measure an inch. They spend the winter under cornstalks, straw, or any other rubbish, and lay their first eggs in early spring in grain fields on the roots or lower part of the stalks. The young are hatched in about twelve days. The nymphs, as they are called, are red in color. They are like the parent, save that they are very small and are without wings. They feed on the roots of the grain for a time; then attack the stalks and blades. In about two months from the laying of the egg the entire generation, numbering millions in a badly infested field, have their growth, and start on the march for new pastures where they at once lay eggs for a second brood. Sometimes their advance may be stayed by a ditch into which they tumble; if holes be dug at ten foot intervals in the bottom of the ditch the bugs will collect in them and be destroyed. Their only natural check seems to be a contagious disease which carries them off in multitudes. The various agricultural experiment stations are making an effort to check this pest by introducing diseased bugs in localities where the chinch-bug is in vigorous condition. It is estimated that the extermination of the chinch-bug would add $100,000,000 to the annual productivity of American farms. Of field crops rye is the grain least subject to this pest. Rice may be saved by flooding. See Fly ; Insect; Bug ; Hessian Fly
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The insect Aiton's described in 1910 is Blissus leucopterus, and the basic natural history in the entry — overwintering in rubbish, red wingless nymphs, two broods, the march on foot to new fields — is still taught much as written. What collapsed was the great hope of the box: the "contagious disease," a fungus distributed to farmers by state experiment stations (notably in Kansas from the late 1880s), was found by later investigators to spread only in humid weather, so the epidemics credited to it were really the work of the weather, and the mailing of diseased bugs was abandoned. Barrier ditches gave way first to lines of coal tar or creosote, then after the 1940s to insecticides, and the chinch bug faded as a headline pest for a less dramatic reason: hybrid corn, crop rotation and the separation of small grain from corn removed the conditions it needed. The $100,000,000 loss figure now looks like a relic — in the United States the insect's troublesome relative is the southern chinch bug of lawns and St. Augustine grass rather than a destroyer of the wheat crop.
Written for this edition, 2026.