they carry tucked up under their head like a huge crop, by an organ 
reminding one of a miniature elephant’s trunk. This ball of pollen 
is often two or three times the size of the insect’s head. The 
moth darts off to another flower with its ball and lays its eggs in 
the tissue of the pistil base, and stuffs the ball of pollen into the 
pistil pocket, all the time moving its head to and fro. In five 
days or so the eggs hatch, and in a few weeks the grubs have 
eaten their allotment of 18 or 20 partly mature seeds, have made 
a hole through the immature yucca fruit, let themselves to the 
ground by a thread, burrowed into the ground and spun their 
cocoon. When the yuccas bloom again, they appear as moths, 
once more ready for the performance. When these moths are 
absent, as often happens in ornamental plantations or botanic 
gardens, no seeds or yucca fruits are formed as the yucca cannot 
pollinate itself and no other moths or insects seem to be able to 
perform the act. 
Although one of the most anciently cultivated fruits, man still 
has much to learn about figs. When the Smyrna fig was intro- 
duced into California the American fig-grcwers laughed at the 
“book stories’’ of the relation between this type of fig and the part 
the tiny capri-fig wasp played in making the trees bear. “Oriental 
superstition,” however, turned out to be based on hard, solid 
act, and now “ caprification ” is practiced in California among 
growers of this type of fig with the same zeal that the Syrians 
have shown for centuries. The fig is not a fruit developed from 
a single flower, as most of our fruits are, but the result of an 
aggregation of hundreds of flowers. And these flowers which are 
all female, form the inner lining, so to speak, of a pear-shaped 
bag. All the cultivated varieties of fig bear only female flowers, 
while both male and female flowers are found on the capri or so- 
called wild fig. All the common or Adriatic figs develop “good 
figs” without pollination, but there are no fertile seeds. The 
Smyrna type of fig absolutely requires pollination to bring it to 
maturity, and since there are no male flowers on these trees, the 
pollen must be brought from the capri-fig trees. Obviously the 
wind cannot pollinate the bag-enclosed female flowers, nor could 
man. But associated with the capri-fig is a little wasp, the female 
of which, heavily dusted with pollen, crawls out of the capri- 
fig fruit and flies away to deposit her eggs. In so doing, she 
enters the Smyrna fig through a small almost scale-covered hole 
in the end of the immature fig, wanders around, incidently pollin- 
ating the receptive pistils of the female flowers, which later de- 
velop seed. These seeds are responsible in part for the superior 
quality of the Smyrna fruit. She is unable to lay her eggs because 
the pistils are too long for her egg laying apparatus. She soon 
dies without having left any progeny, which is fortunate, for if 
eggs had been laid, the Smyrna figs would be largely insects 
instead of fruit. Her race is continued, however, by those of her 
species which lay their eggs in the wild or capri-figs. In practise, 
capri-figs are planted at the rate of two or three trees to the acre, 
14 
