The beginnings of practical insect pathology can be traced into antiquity to work with beneficial insects. As a disci- pline, however, it is a fairly young branch of science. There are several accounts of published research in insect pathology in the early literature dating from Bassi's incrimination of Beauveria bassiana as a pathogen of the silkworm in 1835, but the field came into its own in the 1940s and 1950s with the development of formal course work in insect pathology and the publication of Principles of Insect Pathology (Steinhaus, 1949). Over the past two decades, interest in the use of alternative insecticides due to environmental.
