The result more than justified the most sanguine expectations. The ladybirds reached Los Angeles alive, and, with appetites sharpened by their long ocean voyage, immediately fell upon the devoted scales and devoured them one after another almost without rest. Their hunger temporarily satisfied, they began to lay eggs. These eggs hatched in a few days into active grub-like creatures--the larvae of the beetles--and these grubs proved as voracious as their parents. They devoured the scales right and left, and in less than a month transformed once more to beetles. And so the work of extermination went on. Each female beetle laid on an average 300 eggs, and each of these eggs hatched into a hungry larva. Supposing that one-half of these larvae produced female beetles, a simple calculation will show that in six months a single ladybird became the ancestor of 75,000,000,000 of other ladybirds, each capable of destroying very many scale insects. [Illustration: Twig of olive infected with Black Scale] Is it any wonder, then, that the fluted scales soon began to disappear? Is it any wonder that orchard after orchard was entirely freed from the pest, until now over a large section of the State hardly an Icerya is to be found? And could a more striking illustration of the value of the study of insects possibly be instanced? In less than a year from the time when the first of these hungry Australians was liberated from his box in Los Angeles the orange trees were once more in bloom and were resuming their old-time verdure--the Icerya had become practically a thing of the past. [Illustration: Rhizobius, the imported enemy of the Black Scale of the Olive.]