92 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



before the House Agricultural Committee admitted : "This 

 is absolutely the most difficult problem in economic en- 

 tomology that the whole world has ever had to handle." 

 He went on to say that the weevil had no natural enemy, 

 and no insecticide yet discovered was of avail. "The wee- 

 vil will starve before it will eat anything but cotton." 

 There was not a possibility of stopping its spread for 

 its generations are capable of combined flights amounting 

 to fifty to seventy-five miles a year. 26 Hon. George F. Bur- 

 gess testified that the cold did not affect the weevil. "We 

 have frozen some of the scoundrels in a bar of ice and 

 kept them two days and then broken the bar of ice and 

 put them in the sun and they thawed out and flew off." 



Research by government specialists and journalism 

 had spread pictures and descriptions of the insect until 

 it was known to farmers far and wide. Hundreds of 

 species of weevils resemble the Mexican boll weevil. The 

 weevil was on the public mind, and many people reported 

 finding specimens far outside the infected area. The 

 Department stated that the only sure way to determine 

 that a suspected insect was a weevil was to send it to 

 an entomologist for examination. 28 Before long, however, 

 this grayish, or brownish bug, one-fourth of an inch long 

 with a snout half the length of its body, was to become 

 too well known to require expert identification. A puz- 

 zling habit of the boll weevil to play dead helped to 

 identify it in the early days. When touched, the bug 

 usually draws up its limbs and falls to the ground. A 

 strange superstition arose that the weevil's long snout 



26 Hearings before the House Committee on Agriculture Regard- 

 ing the Boll Weevil, p. 29. Ibid., p. 13. 



28 W. D. Hunter and B. R. Coad, The Boll Weevil Problem, 

 Farmers' Bulletin 1329, pp. &-6. 



