40 
They have long been known to infest meal, flour, grain, and veg¬ 
etable stores in Europe, and in the past few years have become 
very troublesome in this country, occasioning considerable alarm 
among millers, flour and feed dealers, grocers, and dealers in 
patent foods. It is not an uncommon pest in our museum collec¬ 
tions, feeding on the dead bodies of insects. The adult insects 
are small, flat, reddish-brown beetles, about three sixteenths of an 
inch in length. Our most common species, 7 7 . confusum , is represented 
in its different stages in Eig. 5 (p. 39). The eggs are deposited in 
the flour, from which the young hatch a little later. There are four 
or five broods during the year. They are offensive creatures, and 
impart a disagreeable odor to the infested material. Their carniv¬ 
orous habits, however, make some amends for the mischief they do. I 
have frequently seen the adults of both weevils preying upon the 
larvae and pupae of the flour moth in mills in California. In one 
reel, where a great number of the flour-moth larvm had pupated, 
it was rather difficult to find a single cocoon which did not con¬ 
tain an adult of either confusum or ferrucjineum , the former spe¬ 
cies being, however, most abundant. The flour-moth chrysalids, 
in most cases, had been completely devoured. 
August 18, 1395, I placed a hundred adult beetles of confusum , 
received August 15 in flour from Toledo, Ojco, in a breeding-cage 
in which several hundred larvae of the flour moth had just pupatexl, 
and left them undisturbed for several days. August 26, I^made 
a careful examination and found that the weevils had penetrated 
two thirds of the cocoons and destroyed the chrysalids within 
them. August 30, two flour moths emerged from this cage, but 
no others issued at any time later. There was an abundance of 
wheat flour and corn meal in the cage, which fact alone would 
seem to suggest that the weevil prefers insect food when it is 
available. Ihese weevils were left in the cage undisturbed, where 
they have been breeding continuously ever since, and there are 
now in the cage thousands of adults and larvue. 
One enthusiastic miller in San Francisco, California, who ob¬ 
served the fl air weevil feeding upon the larva of the flour moth, 
made artificial breeding beds for the former and distributed them 
about his mill in the hope of reducing the flour moth, which was 
everywhere present in his mill. August 23, 1895, he wrote me 
the following letter on this subject: “I had hopes of some as¬ 
sistance from the little weevil, having observed them feasting on 
the larvae of the flour moth. I cultivated colonies of them°and 
distributed them through the mill, and watched them very closely 
for some weeks. I found that while they did attack the larvae to 
some extent, it was still not enough to be of any particular beuefit. 
The little beetles are themselves a pest, as they get into the 
meals and flour and make trouble there, so 1 have abandoned any 
hope in that direction.” 
I have seen the notorious cadelle (Tenebrioides mauritanica ), 
known sometimes as the “bolting-cloth beetle” iu California, at¬ 
tacking both the larva and pupa of the flour moth and devouring 
both the larva and adult of the flour weevil, T. confusum , in my 
