54 THIRD ANNUAL REPORT OF 



year grows his own seed will suffer as much as the man who origin- 

 ally introduces the weevils from afar. 



Except in being smaller, the larva and pupa of this weevil have 

 a close resemblance to those of the Pea-weevil, and its habits are 

 very similar, with the exception that the female deposits a greater 

 number of eggs on a single pod, so that sometimes over a dozen lar- 

 vse enter a single bean. I have counted as many as fourteen in one 

 small bean, and the space required for each individual to develop is 

 not much more than sufficient to snugly contain the beetle. The 

 little spot where the Pea-weevil entered can always be detected even 

 in the dry pea, but in the bean these point's of entrance become al- 

 most entirely obliterated. The cell in which the transformations take 

 place is more perfect and smooth, and the lining is easily distin- 

 guished from the meat of the bean by its being more white and 

 opaque. The excrement is yellow or darker than the meat, and even 

 where a bean is so badly infested that the inside is entirely reduced 

 to this excrementitious powder, each larva, before transforming, man- 

 ages to form for itself a complete cell, which separates it from the 

 rest of its brethren. The eye-spot, as in the pea, is perfectly circular 

 and quite transparent in white-skinned varieties, so that infested 

 beans of this kind are easily distinguished by the bluish-black spots 

 which they exhibit (Fig. 10, h). Dark beans when infested are not so 

 easily distinguished. 



I have always found the germ either untouched or but partially 

 devoured even in the worst infested beans, so that when but two or 

 three weevils inhabit a bean, it would doubtless grow ; but where the 

 meat is entirely destroyed, as it often is, the bean would hardly grow 

 though the germ remained intact, and it would certainly not produce 

 a vigorous plant. 



Many of the beetles are perfected in the fall, but many of them 

 not till the following spring, so that there is the same danger of in- 

 troducing them in seed-beans, as in the case of the Pea- weevil. The 

 remedies and preventives given in the former case will of course ap- 

 ply equally well in this, and I hope that every bean-grower in Mis- 

 souri who reads this article will make some effort to keep the scourge 

 out of his own neighborhood, by urging upon others, at the Farmers' 

 Club, or at the meetings of any local societies, the necessity of sow- 

 ing only sound seed, and of thoroughly destroying any that may be 

 received from abroad and found buggy. 



.Regarding the proper nomenclature of our Bean-weevil, there 

 has been some confusion, and though it has heretofore been consid- 

 ered by several eminent entomologists as the Bruclius olsoletus 

 of Say, and I have heretofore, upon insufficient grounds, referred it to 

 that species myself, it nevertheless turns out to be undescribed. In 

 Europe, besides the Grain Bruclius which I just treated of, there are 

 several other species belonging to the same genus which attack 



