JOURNAL 
OF 
ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 
OFFICIAL ORGAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGISTS 
Vol. 13 
JUNE, 1920 
No. 3 
Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual Meeting of the 
American Association of Economic Entomologists 
(Continued from p. 256 ) 
Afternoon Session, Friday, January 2, 1.00 p. m. 
After the conclusion of the business, a number of papers were read. 
President W. C. O’Kane: The first paper is “The Cornpith 
Weevil,” by G. G. Ainslie. 
THE CORNPITH WEEVIL (CENTRINUS PENICELLUS. 
HBST.) 
By George G. Ainslie, U. S. Bureau Entomology, Knoxville, Tenn. 
In 1911 it was first noted that in Tennessee the upper two or three 
nodes of corn stalks are very commonly bored by a curculionid larva. 
Whenever possible since that time notes have been made on the insect 
doing this work and now when there is so much interest in corn stalk 
borers it will be well to set out the main facts in its life history. 
The work, for it can hardly be called injury, is done by the larva of 
Centrinus penicellus, a small brownish-yellow rhyncophorous beetle 
whose host plant and life history have never been recorded. Dr. 
W. D. Pierce places the species in the genus Geraeus but Blatchley and 
Leng (1916) retain the name Centrinus. 
The insect passes the winter as a milk-white larva curled in a small 
spherical cell in the earth. The first beetles make their appearance 
about July 1 increasing gradually in numbers until early August. 
Eggs are laid during this period and the larvae feed through the rest of 
the summer reaching their growth and leaving the corn stalk for the 
earth about October 1. There is but one generation a year. 
