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a 
THE CURCULIO. 
The Presrpent.—Mr. Billups will now read to us his paper on the Curculio, 
Mr. Bittups.—I have not had at my disposal sufficient time in which to prepare 
such a paper as I would have desired to read before this Association, but I will endeavor 
in a few words to give a brief outline of the curculio family. 1 may say, in the first 
place, that the curculio is distinguished from other coleoptera by having the head prolonged 
in all cases into a snout of greater or less extent ; in some cases that snout extends three 
or four times the length of the whole insect, while in others it is scarcely noticeable. 
The curculio in fact is a very hard family to define; it is hard to say where the true 
curculio begins and ends. I have upon the table here a fair representation of all the 
different genera of the curculio known throughout the globe. I think it would perhaps 
be well to give a brief outline of the life history of the insect, and in doing so I do not 
think I shall be far wrong in taking the familiar plum curculio as an example, it being I 
believe a fairly typical species of the great family Curculionids. So infinitely small are 
many members of this family that it is difficult to give to one unaccustomed to them any 
idea of the differences which exist in the different genera, but to the eye of one accustom- 
ed to handling such small insects the difference is vast. In the diagram before you you 
see in No. | the Jarva of the curculio. No. 2 shows the next stage, the chrysalis, and 
No. 3 the perfect insect. I have in a bottle here the egg of the plum curculio. This 
curculio bites and destroys a great variety of fruit; the cherry, the plum, the peach, and 
} believe in some instances the grape. It Jays its eggs early in the spring upon the plum. 
The female commences by working a small puncture in the skin of the plum, as repre- 
sented in No. 4, and deposits the egg, and makes a semi-circular bite around the spot on 
which the egg has been laid. This causes the skin of the plum to wither and dry up, 
and affords food for the young grub. When first hatched I have generally noticed that 
this grub, after spending a short time in the exact locality of its hatching place, moves in 
a circuitous manner around the skin of the plum, and finally ends up very near the stem, 
This causes the plum to weaken and rot around the stem, and either by its own weight 
or by the first windstorm it is caused to fall to the ground. The larva, which during the 
time the plum rotted had a suflicient period in which to gather strength, after a certain 
lapse of time disappears into the ground-and changes to the chrysalis state, No. 2. Iam 
soiry to say I havo no specimens of the chrysalis, but I have a number of specimens of 
the larvae in different stages of advancement. Now, as regards the methods of destroy- 
ing the curculio, which 1 suppose is the most important thing to this meeting, as far as 
my experience goes the only true way to get rid of them is to gather up the fallen plums. 
I think it is almost impossible to do anything by waging war against the perfect insect, 
as the perfect insect eats very little. Nearly all the feeding in insects of every order, I 
may say, takes place when it is in the larval state. The object of the full grown insect 
is chiefly to find a resting place for its egg, and that done its usefulness is over, and it 
dies. I think the plum curculio lays from thirty to as high as fifty eggs. Of course 
that means if there are twenty or thirty curculios on one tree that not much of the fruit 
is going to escape. The curculios are all vegetable feeders, some of them live upon the 
seeds of plants, some upon the stems, and a great many upon the fruit. It is generally 
supposed there are only a few injurious curculios, which [ suppose is owing to the want 
of tuking sufficient interest in the masses of vegetation by which we are surrounded, but. 
there are very few plants in this or any other country but what have their own special 
curculio. I think there is no just idea formed of the vast number of curculios that exist 
upon the earth. The best catalogue we have, the Munich catalogue, which is five years 
old, enumerates 10,000 distinct species, but I think that in the past two or three years 
there have been some huudred or more sp:cimens discovered new to America. I think 
Prof. Brodie, of Toronto—I am not certain in making this statement —told me he had fifteen 
or twenty undetermined species that be had found in Canada. If that is correct, and 
every entomologist has done as much as he has, though he has not made a specialty of 
curculionidze—if they have all taken five or six undescribed specimens, there must have 
been an immense swelling of that Munich catalogue. I have here one of the larger cur- 
culio, which attacks the sugar cane. It is one of about the largest size that exists. From 
