44 
PLANTS AND INSECTS 
on top of the other as a mason would lay stones. They smooth the 
inside as a plasterer would spread mortar on ai wall, close the top, and 
await a favorable signal to break forth. 
Within eight or ten days they can jump four or six inches, and 
at the age of three or four weeks a desire to “move out and explore” 
manifests itself. At this age these creatures are yet without wings, 
but at this wingless stage they are far more destructive than the full- 
grown flying locust. They march straight ahead in countless armies, and 
destroy every green blade in their line of march. If not hindered, they 
feed and feed until their wings appear, then they rise into the air and 
continue their progress by flying. 
The Arabs have a legend regarding the destructiveness of the 
locusts. “We are the army, ... we produce ninety-nine eggs; if the 
hundred were completed, we should consume the whole earth and all 
that is in it.” It is said that the female lays only nineteen eggs, but 
whether it be nineteen or ninety-nine, we are well convinced of the 
destructiveness of these creatures. 
In flying in enormous hosts, they can be seen coming through the 
air at a distance of about seven miles. They have been met in a cloud 
five hundred feet high, 1,200 miles from land. The distance they fly 
in a day depends in a great measure upon the amount of food they find. 
Locusts settling in certain districts change in one season the once 
beautiful garden country to a wilderness. —Opal F. Brookover. 
SNOUT-BEETLES AND HOW THEY INJURE NUTS 
TT OW disappointing it is, after we have broken open a smooth, sound- 
A 1 looking nut, to find that the kernel is worm-eaten and unfit for 
food! And to make it disgusting, there are, occupying the shell, robust, 
white or yellowish white grubs with red or brown heads. Where did 
they come from? And how did they get inside the shell? If the shell 
of the 1 nut had been punctured with holes, we should have expected the 
kernel to be bad, although there might be a query in our minds con¬ 
cerning the life of the creature that spoiled it. But the mystery is all 
the greater because of the apparent perfection of the shell. Let us seek 
for an explanation in a study of the lives of a certain class of insects 
known as snout-bettles. 
Nuts are attacked by many kind of insects, but by far the mosi 
