27 

cayenne pepper, ergot, turmeric, yeast cakes, rice, figs, prepared fish 
food, and dried plants prepared for the herbarium. 
Working as it does in all kinds of cured tobacco and living in this 
substance during all stages of its existence, it damages cigarettes and 
cigars principally by boring out of them, making round holes in the 
wrappers so that they will not draw (fig. 23). Leaf tobacco is injured 
for wrapping purposes by being punctured with holes made both by 
the larve and the beetles, and fillers and fine cut are injured by the 
reduction of their substance by the actual amount consumed by the 
larve. The adulteration of fine cut by the bodies of the insects and 
by their excrement is also a kind 
of damage, though an entomological 
acquaintance of the writer insists 
that he buys infested short cut by 
preference, both because he can get 
it cheaper and because the bodies 
of the insects impart a distinct and 
not disagreeable flavor to the to- 
baeco. He admits, however, that 
it is a cultivated taste. 
The cigarette beetle is practically 
cosmopolitan, and probably occurs 
in most tobacco factories in the 
Southern States, as well as in most 
wholesale drug stores. In the far 
South this insect multiplies rapidly 
throughout the greater part of the 
year, and its development is practi- 
eally continuous in artificially 
warmed factories farther north. 
Observations upon the life history 
of the species were made by Prof. 
George F. Atkinson some years ago, Fia. 28.—Work of cigarette beetle—reduced 
when he was connected with the PES ee 
North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station, and more recently by 
Mr. Chittenden, of the Division of Entomology. It seems tolerably cer- 
tain that there are two generations produced each year in the District 
of Columbia. Professor Atkinson says that he has seen the beetles 
in copulation in January at Chapel Hill, N. C., but Mr. Chittenden 
has never seen the beetles later than November or earlier than May. 
It passes the coldest of the winter months in the larva state. In arti- 
ficially warmed buildings the insect is apt to be present in all stages 
at almost any time of the year. Professor Atkinson observed that 
the larve hatch in eleven days from the time of egg laying, and that 
they remain as larve from sixty to seventy days. The larva (fig. 24) 
when full grown spins a fairly compact cocoon of a silky substance 
covered with bits of whatever substance the insect is breeding in. In 
this cocoon it soon transforms to a pupa and the adult beetles emerge 


















































