296 
Beetles 
J to J inch long, clay-yellow or mottled brownish, and lay their eggs in 
chestnuts, hazelnuts, acorns, walnuts, hickory-nuts, etc. The white, yellow¬ 
headed, maggot-like larva feeds on the kernel, and is full-grown at the 
time the nuts drop. It either lies in the nut over winter or crawls out and 
into the ground, where it pupates, and transforms into an adult; B. rectus 
and B. quercus are common acorn-weevils, B. caryatrypes (Fig. 404) a 
common chestnut-weevil, and B. nasicus a hickory-nut weevil. 
The genus Anthonomus includes small pear-shaped, modestly colored 
weevils with long slender snouts. A. quadrigibbus , the apple-weevil, £ inch 
long, dull brown, with four conspicuous brownish-red humps on the hinder 
part of the body, lays its eggs in little blackish-margined holes drilled into 
apples; the white, footless, wrinkled, brown-headed larva on hatching bur¬ 
rows into the core, feeds around it, ejecting much rusty-red excrement, and 
finally pupates, the adult weevil gnawing its way out to the surface. A. sig- 
natus, the strawberry-weevil, blackish with gray pubescence, punctures 
the buds, laying an egg in each, and then punctures the flower-pedicel below 
the bud, so that it drops off; the larva feeds on the fallen unopened bud, 
changing to a beetle in midsummer. A. grandis is the notorious boll- 
weevil of the South, which has made its way since 1890 from Mexico into 
this country and is now one of our most serious insect pests; it destroys as 
much as ninety per cent of the cotton-crop in badly infested localities. The 
eggs are deposited in the buds and bolls, and the larvae feed on seed and 
shell, pupating inside the wall of the boll, through which the issuing beetle 
gnaws its way. This pest seems to feed only on cotton. 
Next to the codlin-moth and San Jose scale probably the most notorious 
and destructive fruit-pest is the plum-curculio, Conotrachelus nenuphar 
(Fig. 405), a small beetle, J inch long, brown, 
and with four small elevated excrescences on 
the hard wing-covers. The beetles hibernate 
in rubbish, such as accumulated leaves, about 
the orchard, and come out in early spring to feed 
on the tender buds, leaves, flowers, and even 
green bark. When the plums have set, the 
females begin to deposit their eggs in them by 
drilling a tiny hole and pushing an egg into 
each. Then a concentric slit is cut near the 
Fig. 405. —The plum-curculio, 
Conotrachelus nenuphar . 
(After photograph by Slinger- 
,land; enlarged.) 
hole so as to leave the egg in a little flap in which the tissue is so injured 
that the rapid growing of the fruit does not injure the delicate egg buried 
in it. The whitish larva bores in until it reaches the stone around which 
it feeds. (The larva of the plum-gouger, Coccotorus scutellaris, another 
destructive Curculionid pest of the plum, bores into the stone.) When 
the larvae are full-grown the infested plums fall to the ground, and the larvae 
