Studies on the Seasonal Incidence of Insect Population in Lucerne and the Effect of Insecticides

Abstract

Valuable contributions have been made to investigate the effect of temperature and humidity on the development, growth, metabolism, longevity, fecundity, distribution etc. of various insects particularly storage pests, predators and parasites, and relatively fewer crop pests (Cook, 1927; Pruthi and Pradhan, 1945; Pradhan and Vishwanathan, 1959; Narayanan et al., 1962 etc.), but very little has been studied to assess the overall population incidence during different seasons, and consequently no estimate of actual losses even on 'guesstimates' are available. Simultaneously, on the other hand, it becomes imperative to device suitable chemical control for the population reduction, since the loss caused by insect pests, in general, is a function of their population incidence. With this view, therefore, a study was undertaken in lucerne (Medicago sativa Lin.) which is an important fodder crop throughout Rajasthan, harbouring a large and varied insect population responsible for substantial tonnage besides considerable nuisance to feeding animals. For studies on frequency of pest infestation in case of maize borers and lucerne weevil, vide Kushwaha and Jain (1963 a,b)

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.A03681

Pages

265 - 270

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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