Printed by The Meriden Gravure Co.
The Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture-1902
Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903
Gould Library Government Documents
In the 1902 Yearbook, the entomologist C.L. Marlatt writes of a pest called the San Jose scale, and its natural enemy: the ladybird. The San Jose scale is notorious for attacking fruit, especially pears, apples, peaches, and currants. Marlatt explains the desirability of the ladybird in respect to controlling the San Jose scale, and the difficulty he had in transporting the ladybirds overseas:
After finding this ladybird so generally present with the San Jose scale and apparently so efficient in keeping the latter within reasonable limits, the desirability of introducing it into America was very evident, and before the writer had left Japan he had collected and shipped several boxes of the insect to Washington.
Of the 150 or 200 beetles which the writer shipped from Japan and China to America not more than 30 arrived in Washington alive, and all but two of these perished during the winter. In shipping these beetles they were placed in small wooden boxes packed full of scale-infested twigs and sent through the mails, with the exception of one package, which was personally taken across the Pacific by Miss Laura Bell, and mailed in Vancouver…Fortunately, one at least of the two survivors was an impregnated female, and began laying eggs in early April…
C.L. Marlatt