APIIIDIDAE This large and exceedingly important family has been given less attention than some of the other families, partly because the most important species have received extended investigation, partly due to the effort to clean up details of life history for some of the destructive but little known species in other families. No attempt has been made to collect the species occurring in the Cranberry Lake region.
The group is of remarkable interest on account of its unusual mode of reproduction, its enormous rate of multiplication and the many puzzling phases of its attacks on different hosts, seasonal migrations, alternate hosts, etc., which cannot be taken up in detail within the limits of this paper.
Ecologically, they may be characterized as uniformly plant feeders. Most of the species, practically all for this region, attack leaves, twigs or smaller branches. They multiply so rapidly and form such large colonies that. the drain on the plant from the constant sticking of sap frequently results in wilting or withering of plant infested. Such species as the Pine chermes, Alder blight and Beech blight become very conspicuous on account of the forma tion of great quantities of cottony or wooly covering, the waxy filaments being secreted by special wax-glands of the dorsal part of the body (mainly located on hack of abdomen).
One of the ecologic associations of special interest is found in the very frequent, almost universal, presence of ants attending the colonies of aphids, the ants utilizing the "honey dew" secretion from the aphids as food. The numerous predaceous and parasitic insects assisted by spiders and birds destroy immense numbers of plant lice and thus the enormous reproductive powers of the aphids are counterbalanced and kept down to such an extent that the plants on which they feed have sonic show of survival.
Hormaphis papyraceae lives on willow birch and corresponds well with the description of gall by Oestlund. The galls consist of a distinctly corrugated structure between the leaf veins and con tains numerous dark brown or black aphids. Calliptcres betu laccolens (alate individuals, and various sizes of nymphs and wing less adults) were found in some of the galls occurring on yellow birch leaves, but more commonly entirely independent of the galls and evidently in the galls by accident.