COTTON OR BOLL WEEVILS 



By J. L. Webb, associate entomologist. Division of Insects Affecting Man and 

 Animals. Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine 



CONTEXTS 



Page Page 



Introduction. 1 



What the boll weevil look? like 1 



How the boll weevil grows 2 



How and where the boll weevil spends the 



winter _ . 4 



How the boll weevil injures the crop 5 



Where the boll weevil came from and where it 



is now 6 



How nature helps to control the boll weevil 8 



How to fight the boll weevil 9 



When and how to use calcium arsenate 13 



Other ways of destroying the boll weevil 14 



INTRODUCTION 



Insects, like all other living creatures, need food. But their eating: 

 is often of considerable importance to man because they injure or 

 destroy crops upon which he depends for food, clothing, or other 

 necessities. 



Consider the boll weevil. To keep alive it must have green plant 

 food. There are only two or three plants that it will eat. and cotton 

 is one of them — in fact, the one it much prefers. When the weevil 

 cannot get cotton, however, it will feed on other plants, such as okra 

 and hollyhocks, which are close relatives of cotton. 



The fact that this weevil feeds almost entirely on cotton is very 

 important. When an insect eats only one kind of plant, it must 

 have a great deal more of that plant each day for its food than it 

 would need if it ate several kinds. Insects increase very fast and 

 eat so much of their food plant that there is sometimes not enough 

 left for man to use. This is true of the boll weevil. Each year 

 there are millions of these weevils and they get hungry every day. 

 If there is no way to destroy them in the cotton fields, they will eat 

 so much of the crop that there will not be enough left to pay the plant- 

 ers for growing it. 



WHAT THE BOLL WEEVIL LOOKS LIKE 



The boll weevil is a small grayish or brownish, hard-shelled beetle 

 with six legs and a long nose, or snout (fig. 1). Persons living in the 

 South have probably seen these insects in the cotton fields and may 

 have picked them off the growing plants. Upon close examination a 

 great many interesting things are to be found out about them. 



In the first place, the weevil is only about one-fourth of an inch 

 long and one-twelfth of an inch broad. Really it is very small to 

 cause so much trouble. If a person looks carefully at one of them 



1 This publication supersedes Miscellaneous Publication 35. Cotton or Weevils, by J. I.. Webb, formerly 

 of the Division of Cotton Insect Investigations, Bureau of Entomology ami Plant Quarantine, and F. A. 



Merrill, Extension Service. Mr. Webb died Januarv 20. 1942. 



