296 Beetles 



to f inch long, clay-yellow or mottled brownish, and lay their eggs in 

 chestnuts, hazelnuts, acorns, walnuts, hickory-nuts, etc. The white, yellow- 

 headed, maggot-like larva feeds on the kernel, and is full-grown at the 

 time the nuts drop. It either lies in the nut over winter or crawls out and 

 into the ground, where it pupates, and transforms into an adult; B. rectns 

 and B. quercus are common acorn-weevils, B. caryatrypes (Fig. 404) a 

 common chestnut-weevil, and B. nasicus a hickory-nut weevil. 



The genus Anthonomus includes small pear-shaped, modestly colored 

 weevils with long slender snouts. A. quadrigibbus, the apple- weevil, ^ inch 

 long, dull brown, with four conspicuous brownish-red humps on the hinder 

 part of the body, lays its eggs in little blackish-margined holes drilled into 

 apples; the white, footless, wrinkled, brown-headed larva on hatching bur- 

 rows into the core, feeds around it, ejecting much rusty-red excrement, and 

 finally pupates, the adult weevil gnawing its way out to the surface. A. sig- 

 natus, the strawberry- weevil, blackish with gray pubescence, punctures 

 the buds, laying an egg in each, and then punctures the flower-pedicel below 

 the bud, so that it drops off; the larva feeds on the fallen unopened bud, 

 changing to a beetle in midsummer. A. grandis is the notorious boll- 

 weevil of the South, which has made its way since 1890 from Mexico into 

 this country and is now one of our most serious insect pests; it destroys as 

 much as ninety per cent of the cotton-crop in badly infested localities. The 

 eggs are deposited in the buds and bolls, and the larvae feed on seed and 

 shell, pupating inside the wall of the boll, through which the issuing beetle 

 gnaws its way. This pest seems to feed only on cotton. 



Next to the codlin-moth and San Jose scale probably the most notorious 

 and destructive fruit-pest is the plum-curculio, Conotrachelus nenuphar 



(Fig. 405), a small beetle, \ inch long, brown, 

 and with four small elevated excrescences on 

 the hard wing-covers. The beetles hibernate 

 in rubbish, such as accumulated leaves, about 

 the orchard, and come out in early spring to feed 

 on the tender buds, leaves, flowers, and even 



green bark. When the plums have set, the 

 FIG. 4os. The plum-curcuho, ' . 



Conotrachelus nenuphar, females begin to deposit their eggs in them by 

 (After photograph by Slinger- drilling a tiny hole and pushing an egg into 

 land; enlarged.) . . ,. . . 



each. Then a concentric slit is cut near the 



hole so as to leave the egg in a little flap in which the tissue is so injured 

 that the rapid growing of the fruit does not injure the delicate egg buried 

 in it. The whitish larva bores in until i.t reaches the stone around which 

 it feeds. (The larva of the plum-gouger, Coccotorus scutellaris, another 

 destructive Curculionid pest of the plum, bores into the stone.) When 

 the larvae are full-grown the infested plums fall to the ground, and the larvae 



