Ants were allowed to run over cankers showing pycnidial pustules
or “spore horns,” and also cankers where ascospores were shooting,
and then placed in flasks of sterile water and washed from two to
twenty-four hours. Plate cultures made from this material showed in
many instances the presence of blight spores on the bodies of the
ants. In the same way it was determined that other insects to the
number of about twenty species also carry the spores of chestnut
blight. The number of spores carried in each instance varied from a
very few to the enormous number of 336,900. The particular insect,
(_Leptostylus maculata_), carrying the 336,900 spores mentioned, is one
of the beetles named in a recent press notice of the U. S. Department
of Agriculture, as being very active in eating spores of the blight
fungus. Therefore this beetle while destroying spores of the blight is
at the same time covering its body with thousands of other chestnut
blight spores which it carries from tree to tree, making it probably an
injurious insect, instead of a beneficial one in this respect.