Tineidæ—Clothes’-moth, Bee-moth, etc.
In Newton’s Journal of the Arts for December, 1827, there is the following mention of a new kind of cloth fabricated by insects: The larvæ of the Moth, Tinea punctata, or T. padilla, have been directed by M. Habenstreet, of Munich, so as to work on a paper model suspended from a ceiling of a room. To this model he can give any form and dimensions, and he has thus been enabled to obtain square shawls, an air balloon four feet high, and a woman’s complete robe, with the sleeves, but without seams. One or two larvæ can weave a square inch of cloth. A great number are, of course, employed, and their motions are interdicted from the parts of the model not to be covered, by oiling them. The cloth exceeds in fineness the lightest
gauze, and has been worn as a robe over her court dress by the Queen of Bavaria.[860]
Authors are of opinion that the ancients possessed some secret for preserving garments from the Moth, Tinia tapetzella. We are told the robes of Servius Tullius were found in perfect preservation at the death of Sejanus, an interval of more than five hundred years. Pliny gives as a precaution “to lay garments on a coffin;” others recommend “cantharides hung up in a house, or wrapping them in a lion’s skin”—“the poor little insects,” says Reaumur, “being probably placed in bodily fear of this terrible animal.”[861]
Moufet says: “They that sell woollen clothes use to wrap up the skin of a bird called the king’s-fisher among them, or else hang one in the shop, as a thing by a secret antipathy that Moths cannot endure.”[862]
Among the various contrivances resorted to as a safeguard against the Bee-moth, Galleria cereana, Fabricius, perhaps the most ingenious is that, mentioned by Langstroth, of “governing the entrances of all the hives by a long lever-like hen-roost, so that they may be regularly closed by the crowing and cackling tribe when they go to bed at night, and opened again when they fly from their perch to greet the merry morn.”[863]
An intelligent man informed Langstroth that he paid ten dollars to a “Bee-quack” professing to have an infallible secret for protecting Bees against the Moth; and, after the quack had departed with his money, learned that the secret consisted in “always keeping strong stocks.”[864]