6 MISC. PUBLICATION 4 84, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 



After the squares on the cotton plant open into blossoms, the bright, 

 showy parts soon fade and drop off. What is left after the flower drops 

 is a small, rounded, green boll, which grows larger and larger as the weeks 

 go by. Inside the boll are growing the seeds, which are covered with the 

 white cotton fibers, or lint. If the boll is not injured by weevils, it 

 will open later in the bright sunshine, and the pure white cotton will 

 be seen peeping out ready to be picked. When the cotton is picked 

 out, the dark cottonseeds come along with it and have to be separated 

 from the cotton before it can be used to make cloth and clothing. 



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

 than one egg in each square, but late in the fall, when sometimes 

 hardly a square or boll can be found without an egg in it, several 

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

 bolls so well as squares as places to lay their eggs, the early bolls 

 usually are not harmed by the weevils if there are plenty of fresh 

 squares to be had. But many of the late bolls often have weevil 

 grubs in them. The grubs eat the soft seed and cause the lint to be 

 short and stained brown. When several grubs feed in one boll, the 

 lint is of poor grade or so badly damaged that it is unfit for picking. 



Once a boll weevil egg is placed in a square, and the egg has 

 hatched into a grub, that square 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. If, then, the weevils lay many eggs, the 

 planter, when he goes to pick his cotton in the fall, will not find much 

 to pick. His fields, which should have been white with cotton, will 

 be dreary wastes, and he will not have money for food and clothing, 

 which his cotton would have bought if it had not been destroyed. 

 Men who have studied the matter carefully say that the boll weevil 

 destrovs about one-tenth of the crop produced in the United States 

 each year, or over $2,000,000,000 worth of cotton. 



WHERE THE BOLL WEEVIL CAME FROM AND WHERE IT IS 



NOW 



Years ago the boll weevil was a stranger in this country. About 

 1892 the first weevils entered the United States from Mexico. They 

 came into this country near Brownsville, Tex., and, judging from the 

 damage they have done, they can certainly be considered "undesirable 

 foreigners." 



But the first comers were hardly noticed. Scientists in the United 

 States Department of Agriculture who study and know most about 

 good and bad insects — entomologists they are called — realized then 

 that these weevils would become bad citizens, but none of the people 

 of the South imagined that they would increase to enormous numbers 

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

 half dozen counties in southern Texas. Even then, outside the coun- 

 ties 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 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, 29 years later, they 

 had reached the farthest northern cotton fields in Virginia. The spread 

 of this weevil for each 5-year period up to 1922 is shown in figure 5. 

 During this time the weevils advanced from 40 to 160 miles each year. 



