Spatial Arrangement of the Eggs of Hylemya Brassicae (Bouché), and a Sequential Sampling Plan for Use in Control of the Species

Counts of eggs of Hylemya brassicae (Bouché) in cabbage did not conform to the Poisson distribution owing to a preponderance of uninfested and highly infested plants. But when the negative binomial series was fitted to the observed distribution, the discrepancies were not significant when tested by chi-square. The spatial pattern may be described by expansion of (q—px)−k with a common k of 0.95.Three methods of transformation stabilized the variance of field counts. A sequential sampling plan based on the negative binomial distribution and providing for two infestation classes was drawn up for use in control of the insect in the stem brassicas.