Y 
COTTON OR WEEVILS 7 
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 !ater 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. 
Karly 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 spread to new territory. 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. 
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