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THE LIFE OF THE WEEVIL

BOOKS BY J. HENRI FABRE

THE LIFE OF THE SPIDER

THE LIFE OF THE FLY

THE MASON-BEES

BRAMBLE-BEES AND OTHERS

THE HUNTING WASPS

THE LIFE OF THE CATERPILLAR

THE LIFE OF THE GRASSHOPPER

THE SACRED BEETLE AND OTHERS

THE MASON-WASPS

THE GLOW-WORM AND OTHER BEETLES

MORE HUNTING WASPS

THE LIFE OF THE WEEVIL

r:^'^7^^^=sm=^^SiS^=^

THE LIFE OF

£- THE WEEVIL

BY

J. HENRI FABRE

TRANSLATED BY

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

FELLOW OF THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1922

COPTBIGHT, 1922

By DODD, mead AND COMPANY Inc.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

I have gathered into this volume the es- says on Weevils contained in the Souvenirs entomologiques, lest I should swell unduly the number of volumes devoted to Beetles, of which there will be three in all, or four if we include the present book.

Chapters I. and VII. to IX. have already appeared, wholly or in part, in an illustrated miscellany, entitled The Life and Love of the Insect, translated by myself and pub- lished by Messrs. Adam and Charles Black (in America by the Macmillan Co.), and Chapter V. and parts of Chapters XI. and XII. in a similar volume, entitled Social Life in the Insect Worlds translated by Mr. Ber- nard Miall and published by Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. (in America by the Cen- tury Co.). I am permitted by arrangement with the firms named to retranslate and reissue the chapters in question for the pur- pose of this collected and definitive edition of Fabre's entomological works.

I am also under no small obligation to Mr. Miall, who has given me the benefit of his assistance throughout.

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Ventnor, 30 November, 1920.

CONTENTS

TRANS CHAPTEE I	LATO] THE	^'S NOTE ..... OLD WEEVILS .	PAGE V I
II	THE	SPOTTED LARINUS .	. 23
III	THE	BEAR LARINUS .	. 53
IV	THE	BOTANICAL INSTINCT .	72
V	THE	ELEPHANT WEEVIL .	. 88
VI	THE	NUT-WEEVIL .	117
VII	THE	POPLAR-WEEVIL .	139
VIII	THE	VINE-WEEVIL . . . .	158
IX	OTHER LEAF-ROLLERS .	. 175
X	THE	SLOE-WEEVIL .	196
XI	THE	PEA-WEEVIL: THE EGGS	229
XII	THE	PEA-WEEVIL: THE LARVA	248
XIII	THE	HARICOT-WEEVIL .	265
XIV	THE	IRIS-WEEVIL .	292
XV	THE	CIONUS	306
	INDEX	. 343

THE LIFE OF THE WEEVIL

CHAPTER I

THE OLD WEEVILS

TN winter, when the insect takes an en- forced rest, the study of numismatics affords me some delightful moments. I love to interrogate its metal disks, the records of the petty things which men call history. In this soil of Provence, where the Greek planted the olive-tree and the Roman planted the law, the peasant finds coins, scattered more or less everywhere, when he turns the sod. He brings them to me and consults me upon their pecuniary value, never upon their meaning.

What matters to him the inscription on his treasure-trove ! Men suffered of yore, they suffer to-day, they will suffer in the future : to him all history is summed up in that ! The rest is sheer futility, a pastime of the idle.

I do not possess this lofty philosophy of indifference to things of the past. I scratch

The Life of the Weevil

the piece of money with my finger-nail, I carefully strip it of its earthy rind, I ex- amine it with the magnifying-glass, I try to decipher its lettering. And my satisfaction is no small one when the bronze or silver disk has spoken. For then I have read a page of humanity, not in books, which are chroniclers open to suspicion, but in records which are, in a manner, living and which were contemporary with the persons and the facts.

This bit of silver, flattened with the die, speaks to me of the Vocontii. ^

"VOOC . . . VOCUNT," says the in- scription.

It comes from the small neighbouring town of Vaison, where Phny the naturalist^ sometimes spent a holiday. Here perhaps, at his host's table, the celebrated compiler

^The Vocontii were a nation of Gauls inhabiting the Viennaise, between the Allobroges on the north, the Caturiges and the estates of King Cottius on the east, the Cavares on the west and the Memini and Vulgientes on the south. Vasio (Vocontia), now Vaison, was their capital. — Translator's Note.

2 Caius Plinius Secundus (23-79), known as Pliny the Elder, or the Naturalist, to distinguish him from his nephew Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (6i-f.-ii5), commonly called Pliny the younger, the historian. He was the author of the famous Naturalis Historia. — Translator's Note.

The Old Weevils

learnt to appreciate the Beccafico/ famous among the Roman epicures and still renowned to-day, under the name of Grasset, among our Provengal gastronomers. It is a pity that my bit of silver says nothing of these events, more memorable than any

battle.

It shows on one side a head and on the other a galloping horse, all barbarously inaccurate. A child trying its hand for the first time with a sharp-pointed stone on the fresh mortar of the walls would produce no more shapeless design. No, of a surety, those bold Allobroges were no artists.

How greatly superior to them were the foreigners from Phocaea ! Here is a drachma of the Massalietes •? massaaihtan^ On the obverse, a head of Diana of Ephesus, chub-faced, full-cheeked, thick-lipped. A receding forehead, surmounted by a diadem; an abundant head of hair, streaming down the neck in a cascade of curls; heavy ear- drops, a pearl necklace, a bow slung over the

^ The Garden Warbler, or Bush-pipet, a bird which is considered a great delicacy, especially in the autumn, when it feeds on figs, grapes and so on. Cf. The Hutit- ing Wasps, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chap. xii. — Translator's Note.

2 From Massalia, the ancient name of Marseilles, of 3

The Life of the Weevil

shoulder. Thus was the idol decked by the hands of the pious Syrian.

To tell the truth, it is not aesthetic. It is sumptuous, if you will, and preferable, after all, to the donkey's-ears which our modern beauties wear perched upon their heads. What a singular freak is fashion, so fertile in the means of ugHfication ! Commerce knows nothing of loveliness, says this divinity of the traders; it prefers profit, embellished with luxury. So speaks the drachma.

On the reverse, a lion clawing the ground and roaring wide-mouthed. Not of to-day alone is the savagery that symbolizes power in the shape of some formidable brute, as though evil were the supreme expression of strength. The eagle, the lion and other marauders often figure on the reverse of coins. But reality is not sufficient; the ima- gination invents monstrosities: the centaur, the dragon, the griffin, the unicorn, the double-headed eagle.

Are the inventors of these emblems so greatly superior to the Redskin who cele- brates the prowess of his scalping-knife with

which Phocaea, in Asia Minor, was the mother city. — Translator's Note.

4

The Old Weevils

a Bear's paw, a Falcon's wing or a Puma's tooth stuck in his hair? We may safely doubt it.

How preferable to these heraldic horrors is the reverse of our own silver coinage recently brought into circulation! It repre- sents a sower who, with a nimble hand, at sunrise, fills the furrows with the good seed of thought. It is very simple and it is great; it makes us reflect.

The Marseilles drachma has for its sole merit its magnificent relief. The artist who made the dies was a master of the graver's tool; but he lacked the breath of inspiration. His chub-faced Diana is no better than a trollop.

Here is the NAMASAT of the Volscae, which became the colony of Nimes. Side by side, profiles of Augustus and of his minister Agrippa. The former, with his dour fore- head, his flat skull, his acquisitive broken nose, inspires me with but little confidence, notwithstanding what gentle Virgil said of him : Dens nobis hac otia fecit.^ It is success that makes gods. Had he not succeeded in

1 "The god made these hours of leisure for us." — Translator's Note.

5

The Life of the "Weevil

his criminal projects, Augustus the divine would have remained Octavius the scoundrel.

His minister pleases me better. He was a great mover of stones, who, with his build- ing-operations, his aqueducts and his roads, came and civilized the rude Volscse a little. Not far from my village a splendid road crosses the plain, starting from the banks of the Aygues, and climbs up yonder, tedious in its monotonous length, to cross the Serignan hills, under the protection of a mighty oppidum, which, much later, became the old castle, the castelas. It is a section of Agrippa's Road, which joined Marseilles and Vienne. The majestic ribbon, twenty centu- ries old, is still frequented. We no longer see the little brown foot-soldier of the Ro- man legions upon it; in his stead we see the peasant going to market at Orange, with his flock of Sheep or his drove of unruly Porkers. Of the two I prefer the peasant.

Let us turn over our green-crusted penny. "COL. NEM.,"i the reverse tells us. The inscription is accompanied by a Crocodile chained to a palm-tree from which hang

1 Colony of Nimes. Nemansus was the Latin name of Nimes. — Translator's Note.

6

The Old Weevils

crowns. It is an emblem of Egypt, con- quered by the veterans who founded the colony. The beast typifying the Nile gnashes its teeth at the foot of the familiar tree. It speaks to us of Antony, the Don Juan; it tells us of Cleopatra, whose nose, had it been an inch shorter, would have changed the face of the globe. Thanks to the memories which it awakens, the scaly- backed reptile becomes a superb historical lesson.

In this way, the important lessons of the numism,atics of metals might be continued for many a day and be constantly varied without departing from my immediate neighbour- hood. But there is another science of numis- matics, far superior and less costly, which, with its medals, the fossils, tells us the his- tory of life. I refer to the numismatics of stones.

My very window-sill, the confidant of by- gone ages, talks to me of a vanished world. It is, literally speaking, an ossuary, whose every particle retains the imprint of past lives. That block of stone has lived. Prickly spines of Sea-urchins, teeth and verte- brae of fish, broken pieces of shells and 7

The Life of the Weevil

fragments of madrepores form a conglomer- ation of dead existences. Examined stone by stone, my house would resolve itself into a reliquary, a rag-fair of ancient things that were once alive.

The rocky stratum from, which we extract our building-materials in these parts covers with its mighty shell the greater portion of the neighbouring uplands. Here the quarry- man has been digging for none knows how many centuries, perhaps since the time when Agrippa hewed Cyclopean blocks to form the stages and the face of the theatre at Orange. And here daily the pick-axe un- covers curious fossils. The most remark- able of these are teeth, still wonderfully pol- ished in the midst of their rough matrix and as bright with enamel as in the fresh state. Some of them are formidable, three-cor- nered, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as a man's hand. What a yawning gulf, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet 1 What mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those notched shears! You shiver at the mere thought of 8

The Old Weevils

reconstructing that awful implement of destruction !

The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the family of the Squali. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon mega- lodon. Our modern Shark, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as a dwarf can give an idea of a giant.

Other Squali, all ferocious gluttons, abound within the same stone. It contains Oxyrhinae (O. xyphodon, Agass.), whose jaws are furnished with curved and toothed Malay creeses; Lamiae (L. denticulata, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with sharp, flexuous daggers, flat on one side, convex on the other; and Notidani (N. primi genius, Agass.), whose sunken teeth are crowned with radiating indentations.

This dental arsenal, bearing eloquent wit- ness to bygone massacres, can hold its own with the Nimes Crocodile, the Marseilles Diana or the Vaison Horse. With its pan- oply of carnage, it tells me how extermina- tion came at all times to prune the excess of life; it says:

9

The Life of the Weevil

"On the very spot where you stand med- itating upon a splinter of stone, an arm of the sea once stretched, filled with war-like devourers and peaceful victims. A deep in- let occupied the future site of the Rhone valley. Its billows broke not far from your house."

Here in fact are the cliffs of the shore, in such a state of preservation that, when I concentrate my thoughts, I seem to hear the thunder of curving billows. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi,^ Petricolae,^ Pholades ^ have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large enough to contain one's fist; circular cells; cabins with a narrow opening through which the recluse received the in- coming water, laden with food and constantly renewed. Sometimes the erstwhile occupant is there, mineralized, intact to the smallest details of his strise, of his scales, a brittle ornamentation; more often he has dis- appeared, fallen into decay, and his house has filled with a fine sea-mud, hardened into a chalky kernel.

In this quiet inlet, collected by some eddy

lA form of Mussel. — Translator's Note.

^Another genus of bivalve mollucs. — Translator's Note.

^Piddocks. — Translator's Note.

10

The Old Weevils

from the surrounding sea-bed and sunk to the bottom of the oozes, now turned into marl, there are stupendous deposits of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs' burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up Oysters eighteen inches long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could scoop up from this enormous heap Scallops, Coni, ^ 'Cytheres, ^ Mactrae, ^ Murices,^ Turritellae,^ Mitras ^ and others too numerous, too innumerable, to mention. You stand stupefied before the intense vital- ity of the days of old, which was able to supply us with such a mass of relics in a mere hole in the ground.

This necropolis of shells tell us also that time, that patient renewer of the harmony of things, has mown down not only the in- dividual, a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays the neighbouring sea,

iQr Cone-shells. — 'Translator's Note.

2 Bivalved Ostracods. — Translator's Note.

^A genus of molluscs including the Surf Clams and re- lated species. — Translator's Note.

■*Gastropods v/ith a rough, spinose shell. — Translator's Note.

^Gastropods with an elongated, turreted shell. — Trans- lator's Note.

^Or Mitre-shells. Gastropods with a fusiform shell suggesting a bishop's mitre. — Translator's Note. II

The Life of the Weevil

the Mediterranean, contains hardly anything identical with the population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of resemblance between the present and the past, we should have to seek them in the tropical seas.

The climate therefore has become colder; the sun is slowly approaching extinction; the species are dying out. Thus I am told by the numismatics of my stone window-sill.

Without leaving my field of observation, so modest and restricted and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone and this time on the subject of the insect. The country around Apt abounds in a curious rock that breaks off in flakes, not unHke sheets of whity-grey cardboard, which burn with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell. It was deposited at the bottom of the great lakes haunted by Crocodiles and giant Tortoises. Those lakes were never beheld by human eye. Their basins have been replaced by the range of the hills; their muds, slowly depo- sited in thin layers, have become mighty ridges of stone.

Let us remove a slab and subdivide it into flakes with the point of a knife, a task as easy as separating the superimposed sheets

12

The Old Weevils

of a piece of paste-board. In so doing we are examining a volume taken from the li- brary of the mountains; we are turning the pages of a magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far superior to any Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams, nay better, realities converted into pictures.

Here is a page of fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a dish fried in oil. Backbone, fins, vertebral column, the little bones of the head, the crystalline lens turned into a black globule : all is there, in its natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent: the flesh. No matter: our dish of gudgeons looks so good that we feel tempted to scratch a bit off with our finger and taste this super- secular preserve. Let us indulge our fancy and put between our teeth a morsel of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum.

There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection makes good the deficiency. It tells us:

"These fish lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters. Suddenly a spate came, asphyxiating them in its mud-thickened tor- rent. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus 13

The Life of the Weevil

rescued from trie agents of destruction, they have endured through time and will endure indefinitely, under the cover of their wind- ing-sheet."

The same flood brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host of refuse, both vege- table and animal, so much so that the lacus- trian deposit tells also of things on land. It is a general record of the life of the time.

Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather of our album. Here are winged seeds, leaves outlined in brown impressions. The stone herbal rivals the botanical clearness of our ordinary herbals. It repeats what the shells have already taught us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in the old days; it no longer includes palm-trees, laurels oozing with cam- phor, tufted araucarias and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid regions.

Continue to turn the pages. We now come to insects. The most frequent are Diptera, of moderate size, often very humble Flies and Gnats. The teeth of the great Squali surprised us by their smooth poHsh 14

The Old Weevils

amid the roughness of thefr chalky matrix. What shall we say of these frail Midges enshrined intact in their marly reliquary? The feeble creature, which our fingers could not pick up without crushing it, remains un- disturbed beneath the weight of the moun- tains! The six slender legs, which the least touch is enough to disjoint, lie spread upon the stone, correct in shape and arrangement, in the attitude of the insect at rest. There is nothing lacking, not even the tiny double claws at the end of the tarsi. Here are the two wings, unfurled. The fine network of their veins can be studied under the lens as clearly as in the Fly of our collections, stuck on a pin. The antennary plumes have lost rKjne of their fragile grace; the abdomen gives us the number of the segments, edged with a row of specks which once were cilia.

Even the carcase of a Mastodon, defying time in its sandy bed, fills us with amaze- ment; a Gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination.

Certainly, the Mosquito, borne along by the floods, did not come from far away. Before he arrived, some turbulent streamlet 15

The Life of the Weevil

must have reduced him to the nothingness to which he was already so near. Slain by the joys of a morning — a long life for a Gnat — ^he fell from the top of his reed, was straightway drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs.

Who are these others, these dumpy crea- tures, with hard, convex wing-cases, which next to the Flies are the most numerous. Their small heads, prolonged into a snout, tell us beyond dispute. They are probos- cidian Beetles, Rhynchophorae, or, in simpler terms. Weevils. There are small ones, mid- dling ones, large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day.

Their position on the limestone slab is not as correct as the Mosquito's. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum, is now hidden under the breast, now projects forward. Some display it in profile; others — more frequent these — stretch it to one side, as the result of a twisted neck. These contorted insects, with their dislocated mem- bers, did not receive the swift and peaceful burial of the Flies. Though sundry of them may have lived on the plants by the shore, the others, the majority, come from the i6

The Old Weevils

surrounding parts, carried by the rain-water, which warped their joints in crossing such obstacles as twigs and stones. A suit of armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of the members have given way to some extent; and the muddy winding-sheet received the drowned Beetles as the ravages of the journey left them.

These strangers, coming perhaps from afar, supply us with valuable information. They tell us that, if the shores of the gulf had the Mosquito as chief representative of the Insect class, the woods had the Weevil.

Apart from the snout-bearing family, the pages of my Apt rock show me scarcely any- thing else, especially In the order of the Beetles. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus,^ the Dung-beetle, ^ the Capricorn,^ whom the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvest, would have brought to the lake even as it did the

1 Or Ground-beetle. Cf. The Gloiv-ivorm and Other Beetles, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chap. xiii. — Translator's Note.

2 Cf. The Sacred Beetle and Others, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: passim. — Translator's Note.

■' Cf. The Gloiu-'vjorm and Other Beetles: chap. viii. — Translator's Note.

17

The Life of the Weevil

Weevil? There is not the least vestige of those tribes, so prosperous to-day.

Where are the Hydrophilus,^ the Gyrinus,^ the Dytlscus,^ all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had every chance of being handed down to us as mummies between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they used to live In the lake, whose mud would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more effectually than the little fishes and more especially the Fly. Well, of these aquatic Beetles there is no trace either.

Where were they, where were those who are missing from the geological reliquary? Where were the Inhabitants of the thickets, of the greenswards, of the worm-eaten tree- trunks: Capricorns, borers of wood; Sacred Beetles, workers In dung; CarabI, disem- bowellers of game? One and all were In the limbo of the time to come. The present of that period did not possess them; the future awaited them. The Weevil, if I may credit

1 The Great Water-beetle. Cf. The Gloiv-ivorm and Other Beetles: chap. x. — Translator's Note.

2 The Whirligig Beetle. Cf. The Life of the Fly, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixira de Mattos: chap. vii. — Translator's Note.

3 A carnivorous Water-beetle. Cf. idem : chaps, -"ii and viii. — Translator's Note.

i8

The Old Weevils

the modest records which I am able to consult, must therefore be the oldest of the Beetles.

In the beginning, life fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the saurian, it revelled at first in monsters from fifteen to twenty yards long. It placed horns upon their noses and above their eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales and hollowed their necks into spiny pouches wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though with no great success, to give them wings. After these horrors, the procreating ardour calmed down and produced the charming Green Lizard of our hedges.

When it invented the bird. It filled its beak with the reptile's pointed teeth and suspended from its rump a long, feather- clad tail. These indeterminate and revolt- ingly hideous creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the Dove.

All these primitives are noted for a very small skull, an idiot's brain. The prehistoric animal is first and foremost an atrocious 19

The Life of the Weevil

machine for grabbing, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That will come later.

The Weevil, in his fashion, repeats these aberrations to a certain, extent. See the extravagant appendage to his little head. It is here a short, thick snout; there a sturdy beak, round or cut four-square; elsewhere a foolish reed, thin as a hair, long as the body and longer. At the tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal mouth, are the fine shears of the mandibles; on either side, the antennas, with their first joints fitting into a groove.

What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature of a nose? Where did the insect find the model for it? Nowhere. The Weevil invented it and retains the monopoly. Outside his family, no Beetle indulges in these nasal eccentricities.

Observe also the smallness of the head, a bulb that hardly swells beyond the base of the snout. What can it have inside? A very poor nervous equipment, the sign of exceed- ingly limited instincts. Before seeing them at work, we have a poor opinion of the intelligence of these microcephahcs; we

20

The Old Weevils

class them among the obtuse, among creatures deprived of industry. These surmises will not be greatly belied.

Though the Weevil be but little glorified by his talents, this is no reason for despising him. As we learn from the lacustrian schists, he was in the van of the insects with the armoured wing-cases; he was long stages ahead of those which were working out new forms within the limits of the possible. He speaks to us of primitive shapes, sometimes so quaint; he is in his own little world what the bird with the toothed mandibles and the sauri'an with the horned eyebrows are in a higher wo'rld.

In ever-thriving legions, he has come down to us without changing his characteristics. He is to-day as he was in the youth of the continents: the pictures on the chalky slates proclaim the fact aloud. Under any such picture I would venture to write the name of the genus, sometimes even of the species.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form. By consulting the modern Weevil we shall therefore obtain a chapter closely approximate to the biology of his predecessors at the time when Provence

21

The Life of the Weevil

was a land of great lakes shaded by palm- trees and filled with Crocodiles. The history of the present will teach us the history of the past.

22

CHAPTER II

THE SPOTTED LARINUS

T ARINUS Is a vague term, which cannot ■^ teach us anything. The word sounds well. It is something not to afflict the ear with raucous spittings; but the prentice reader wants more than this. He expects the name to give him, in euphonious syllables, a brief description of the insect named. This would help to guide him in the midst of the vast multitude.

I cordially agree with him, while recogni- zing what an arduous task it would be to de- vise a rational nomenclature that would give the beasts the forenames and surnames which they deserve. Our ignorance condemns us to be vague and often nonsensical. Let us con- sider a case in point.

What does Larinus mean? The Greek

lexicon tells us : Aa/otvos, fatty, fat. Has the

insect which is the subject of this chapter

any right to such a description? Not at all.

23

The Life of the Weevil

It is corpulent, I agree, as are the Weevils generally, but does not more than another deserve a certificate of obesity.

Let us look a little deeper. Aapo's means pleasant to the taste, pleasant to the eye, dainty, sweet. Are we there now? Not yet. To be sure, the Larinus is not without daintiness, but how many among the long- nosed Beetles excel him in beauty of costume! Our osier-beds provide nourish- ment for some that are flecked with flowers of sulphur, some that are laced with Chinese white, some that are powdered with malachite-green. They leave on our fingers a scaly dust that looks as though it were gathered from a Butterfly's wing. Our vines and poplar-trees have some that surpass copper pyrites in metallic lustre; the equatorial countries furnish specimens of unparalleled magnificence, true gems beside which the marvels of our jewel-cases would pale. No, the modest Larinus has no right to be extolled as superb. The title of dandy must be awarded to others, in the beak- bearing family, rather than to him.

If his godfather, better-informed, had named him after his habits, he would have 24

The Spotted Larinus

called him an artichoke-thief. The group of the Larini, in fact, establishes its offspring in the fleshy base of the flowers of the Carduaceae, the thistle, the cotton-thistle, the centaury, the carline thistle and others, which, in structure and flavour, recall more or less remotely the artichoke of our tables. This is its special province. The Larinus is charged with the thinning out of the fierce, encroaching thistle.

Glance at the pink, white or blue heads of a Carduacea. Long-beaked insects swarm, awkwardly diving into the mass of florets. What are they? Larini. Open the head, split its fleshy base. Surprised by the air and by the light, plump, white, legless grubs sway to and fro, each isolated in a small recess. What are these grubs? Larinus- larvJB.

Here accuracy;calls for a reservation. A few other Weevils, related to those whose history we are considering, are also partial, on behalf of their family, to the fleshy receptacles with the artichoke flavour. No matter: the species that take the lead in numbers, frequency and handsome pro- portions are the authorized exterminators of

25

The Life of the Weevil

the thistle-heads. Now the reader knows as much as I can tell him.

All the summer, all the autumn, until the cold weather sets in, the most ornamental of our southern thistles grows profusely by the road-side. Its pretty, blue flowers, gathered into round, prickly heads, have won it the botanical name of Echinops, in allusion to the Hedgehog rolled into a ball. It is indeed like a Hedgehog. Better still: it is like a Sea-urchin stuck upon a stalk and turned into an azure globe.

Beneath a screen of star-shaped flowerets the shapely tuft hides the thousand daggers of its scales. Whosoever touches it with an incautious finger is surprised to encounter such aggres"siveness beneath an innocent appearance. The leaves that go with it, green above, white and fluffy underneath, do at least warn the inexperienced: they are divided into pointed lobes, each of which bears an extremely sharp needle at its tip.

This thistle is the patrimony of the Spotted Larinus (L. maculosus, ScH.), whose back is powdered with cloudy yellow patches. The Weevil browses very spar- ingly on the leaves. June is not yet over 26

The Spotted Larinus

before she is exploiting the heads, green at this time and the size of peas, or at most of cherries, with a view to establishing her family. For two or three weeks the work of colonization continues on globes which grow bluer and larger day by day.

Couples are formed, very peaceably, in the glad morning sunlight. The nuptial preliminaries, resembling the embraces of jointed levers, display a rustic awkwardness. With his fore-legs the male Weevil masters his spouse; with his hinder tarsi, gently and at intervals, he strokes her sides. Alterna- ting with these soft caresses are sudden jolts and impetuous jerks. Meanwhile, the object of these attentions, in order to lose no time, works at the thistle-head with her beak and prepares the lodging for her egg. Even in the midst of her wedding the care of the family leaves this laborious insect no repose.

What precisely is the use of the Weevil's rostrum, this paradoxical nose, such as no carnival murmur would venture to wear? We shall find out at leisure, taking our own time.

My prisoners, enclosed in a wire-gauze cover, are working in the sunlight on my 27

The Life of the Weevil

window-sill. A couple has just broken apart Careless of what will happen next, the male retires to browse for a while, not on the blue thistle-heads, which are choice morsels re- served for the young, but on the leaves, where a superficial scraping enables the beak to remove some frugal mouthfuls. The mother remains where she is and continues the boring already commenced.

The rostrum is driven right into the ball of florets and disappears from sight. The insect hardly moves, taking at most a few slow strides now in one direction, now in another. What we see is not the work of a gimlet, which twists, but of an awl, which sinks steadily downwards. The mandibles, the sharp shears affixed to the Implement, bite and dig; and that is all. In the end, the rostrum used as a lever, that Is to say, bend- ing upon its base, uproots and lifts the de- tached florets and pushes them a little way outwards. This must cause the slight un- evenness which we perceive at any Inhabited point. The work of excavation lasts a good quarter of an hour.

Then the mother turns about, finds the 28

The Spotted Larinus

opening of the shaft with the tip of her belly and lays the egg. But how? The pregnant insect's abdomen is far too large and too blunt to enter the narrow passage and deposit the egg directly at the bottom. A special tool, a probe carrying the egg to the point required, is therefore absolutely needed here. But the insect does not possess one that shows; and things take place so swiftly and discreetly that I see nothing of that kind unsheathed.

No matter, I am positively convinced of it: to place the egg at the bottom of the shaft which the rostrum has just bored, the mother must possess a guide-rod, a rigid tube, kept in reserve, invisible, among her tools. We shall return to this curious subject when more conclusive instances arise.

One first point is gained: the Weevil's ros- trum, that nose which at first sight was deemed grotesque, is in reality an instrument of maternal love. The extravagant becomes the everyday, the indispensable. Since it carries mandibles and other mouth-parts at its tip, its function is to eat, that is self- evident; but to this function is added another 29

The Life of the Weevil

of greater importance. The fantastic stylet prepares the way for the eggs; it is the oviduct's collaborator.

And this implement, the emblem of the guild, is so honourable that the father does not hesitate to sport it, though himself in- capable of digging the family cells. Like his consort, he too carries an awl, but a smaller one, as befits the modesty of his role.

A second point becomes clear. In order to insert the egg at convenient points, it is the rule for the insect to possess an im- plement with two functions, an implement which at the same time opens the passage and guides the eggs along it. This is the case with the Cicada,^ the Grasshopper,^ the Saw-fly, the Leucospis ^ and the Ichneumon- fly,^ all of whom carry a sabre, a saw or a probe at the tip of the abdomen.

The Weevil divides the work and appor-

^Cf. The Life of the Grasshopper, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapters i. to V. — Translator's Note.

^Cf. idem: chapter xiv. and passim. — Translator's Note.

3Cf. The Life of the Fly: chapter iii. — \Translator's Note.

* Cf. The Life of the Caterpillar, by J. Henri Fabre,

translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapter xiv.,

in which the activities of one of the Ichneumon-flies,

Microgaster glomeratus, are described. — Translator's Note.

30

The Spotted Larinus

tions it between two implements, one of which, in front, is the perforating augur and the other, behind, hidden in the body and unsheathed at the moment of the laying, is the guiding tube. Except in the Weevils, this curious mechanism is unknown to me.

When the egg is placed in position — and this is quickly done, thanks to the preliminary work of the drill — the mother returns to the point colonized. She packs the disturbed materials a little, she lightly pushes back the uprooted florets; then, without taking further trouble, she goes away. She sometimes even dispenses with these precautions.

A few hours later, I examine the heads exploited, which may be recognized by a certain number of faded and slightly pro- jecting patches, each of which shelters an egg. With the point of my penknife I extract the little, faded bundle and open it. At the base, in a small round cell, hollowed out of the substance of the central globule, the re- ceptacle of the thistle-head, is the egg, fairly large, yellow and oval.

It is enveloped in a brown substance derived from the tissues injured by the mother's augur and from the exudations of 31

The Life of the Weevil

the wound, which have set Hke cement. This envelope rises into an irregular cone and ends in the withered florets. In the centre of the tuft we generally see an opening, which might well be a ventilating-shaft.

The number of eggs entrusted to a single head may easily be ascertained without destroying the cells : all that we need do is to count the yellow blurs unevenly distributed over the blue background. I have found five, six and more, even in a head smaller than a cherry. Each covers an egg. Do all these eggs come from the same mother? It is possible. At the same time, they may be of diverse origin, for it is not unusual to surprise two mothers both occupied in laying eggs on the same globe.

Sometimes the points worked upon almost touch. The mother, it seems, has a very restricted numerical sense and is incapable of keeping count of the occupants. She drives her probe into the florets, unheeding that the place beside her is already taken. As a rule there are too .many, far too many feasters at the niggardly banquet of the blue thistle. Three at most will find enough to live on. The first-comers will thrive; the laggards 32

The Spotted Larinus

will perish for lack of room at the common table.

The grubs are hatched In a week: little white atoms with red heads to them. Suppose them to be three in number, as fre- quently happens. What have the little crea- tures In their larder? Next to nothing.