The dried brown cotton bloom that sticks to the tip (or, at times, off to one side) of the young boll; more frequent in dry weather; sometimes provides a refuge under which young bollworms or tobacco budworms develop protected from beneficial insects and insecticides. Inexperienced scouts sometimes tend to oversample young bolls having a bloom tag. The sampling of bloom-tagged bolls should be carried out in proportion to their percentage of the total boll population.