i COTTON OK WEEVILS / 



flowers drop is a small, rounded, green object which grows larger and 

 larger as the weeks go by. This is the cotton boll, and inside of it are 

 growing the seeds covered with a white cotton fiber. If the boll is 

 not injured by the weevils it will open later in the bright sunshine and 

 the pure white cotton will be seen peeping out ready to be picked. 

 When we pick out this cotton, the dark cottonseeds come along with it 

 and have to be separated from the cotton before we can use it to make 

 cloth and clothing. 



Early in the season the female weevils do not usually place more 

 than one egg in each flower bud, but late in the fall, when it is some- 

 times hard to find a bud or a boll without an egg in it, several eggs 

 may be put in a single boll or bud. Because the females do not like 

 bolls as well as buds, as places to lay their eggs, the bolls usually 

 are not harmed by the weevils as long as there are plenty of fresh 

 buds to be had. 



Once a boll-weevil egg is placed in a flower bud, and the egg has 

 hatched into a grub, that bud is doomed to die. It will never open 

 into a beautiful flower to be followed by a boll of cotton, because 

 the young grub will kill it by eating it up. You can see that if the 

 weevils lay many eggs in your cotton crop, when fall comes and you 

 go to gather your cotton you will not find much to gather. The fields 

 that should be white with cotton will be a dreary waste, and you 

 will not have the money to buy food and clothing that your cotton 

 would have brought you if it had not been destroyed. Men who have 

 studied the matter carefully tell us that the cotton-boll weevil de- 

 stroys, on an average, over $200,000,000 worth of cotton each year. 



WHERE THE WEEVIL CAME FROM AND WHERE IT IS NOW 



Thirty-five years ago the boll weevil was a stranger in our coun- 

 try. About the year 1892 the first weevils entered the United States 

 from Mexico. They came into our country near Brownsville, Tex., 

 and from what they have done since they came here we can certainly 

 consider them as " undesirable foreigners." 



But the first comers were hardly noticed. Scientists in the De- 

 partment of Agriculture who study and know most about good and 

 bad insects — entomologists we call them — realized then that these 

 weevils would become bad citizens, yet none of the people of the 

 South imagined that they would increase to such enormous num- 

 bers and spread all over the Cotton Belt. By 1894 they had covered 

 a half dozen counties in southern Texas. Even then, outside of the 

 counties where there were a good many weevils, the people were not 

 much alarmed. Cotton growers living in other States and even in 

 other parts of Texas were quite sure that this new " cotton bug " was 

 not going to bother them. 



As soon as the weevils were settled in their new home in Texas 

 they began to march like a conquering army. Nothing seemed to 

 stop them as they advanced across the Cotton Belt. In 1923, some 

 29 years later, they had reached the farthest northern cotton fields of 

 Virginia. Figure 5 shows the spread of this weevil, year by year 

 up to 1922. During this time the weevils advanced from 40 to 160 

 miles each year. 



17132°— 29 2 



