vm, D, 1 Jones: The Cigarette Beetle 3 



week previously had discharged a cargo of tobacco from the 

 valley in Manila. 



LIFE HISTORY 



Feeding habits. — It does its chief damage to cigars and ciga- 

 rettes by eating small holes through the wrappers. Some of 

 the substances on which it has been found feeding are un- 

 doubtedly more or less accidental. I have found the cigarette 

 beetle breeding in raisins, rhubarb, yeast-cakes, and tobacco, 

 while Chittenden * reports it as infesting cayenne pepper, ginger, 

 rhubarb, rice, figs, yeast-cakes, dried fish, silk and plush uphol- 

 stery, ergot, turmeric, and tobacco in all forms. In 1895 it was 

 reported as doing great damage to prepared herbarium speci- 

 mens in Washington. Skinner reports it as breeding in the 

 bran of pincushions and in pyrethrum powder strong enough 

 to kill cockroaches. J. B. Smith ^ gives the following articles 

 attacked: Dried roots and seeds of all kinds, cane and rattan 

 work of all kinds, books, gun wads, hellebore, licorice, bella- 

 donna, and saffron. 



Egg. — Because of the secluded places in which the eggs are 

 laid, such as inside the filler, in small folds in the dried tobacco, 

 within the open tip of the cigar or cigarette, or under the over- 

 lapping edges of the wrapper, they are very diflScult to detect. 

 Even in very badly infested stock I have found the eggs on the 

 outsides of cigars only in a very few cases. Small particles of 

 the paste used in cigar manufacture may be mistaken for the 

 eggs of the cigarette beetle, and those who may be familiar with 

 this insect in all its succeeding stages are frequently unfamiliar 

 with the egg. 



The egg (Plate I, fig. 1) is a whitish, opaque, round, elongated 

 object pointed at one end, the other being rounded and covered 

 for a short distance with minute spines; general appearance 

 smooth, shell rather tough and not easily broken. Average 

 length, 0.47 millimeter; width, 0.23 millimeter. 



The eggs are laid during both the day and the night ; the time 

 of most active laying is in the early part of the evening. They 

 are deposited singly in small folds and crevices of leaf tobacco, 

 most frequently along the midrib. Egg-laying begins from two 

 to five days after the emergence of the adult, if copulation has 



'Bull. U. S. Dept. Agr., Bur. Ent. (1896), 4, 126; (1905), 54, 68. 

 'Bull. N. J. Agr. Exp. Sta., Jan. (1907), 203, 35. 



