WHITE BUTTERFLY PEST

Southland Times, Issue 23793, 15 April 1939, Page 18

WHITE BUTTERFLY PEST

While New Zealand tackles the white butterfly scourge by pitting the P ara “ site against it, English research borticulturists are going about the problem in a different way. They are working on the production ol a cabbage which the butterflies will be unable to see. There is said to be a shade of green that the pests cannot distinguish readily and, having developed an optical instrument capable of fixing the exact shade, the research workers are now engaged in producing a plant of the desired colour, A trifle difficult, the reader may think, but the layman is assured that really the task is not so formidable as it would seem. The new green is, to human eyes, not strikingly different from the old. Chief trouble with the butterfly is experienced in England by growers of cabbages; hence the concentration on the one form of vegetable life. Raids by the butterfly in Great Britain are not nearly so devastating as were those seen in New Zealand fields and gardens in 1938. It would seem, therefore, that the elaborate English way of defeating the pest is rather unnecessarily painstaking, but is apparently preferred to the introduction of the effectual little ichneumon fly.