The climate of the West is entirely glorious for all manner of insects. They can put the East to shame in the matter of aphides, cockroaches, cutworms, army and wire-worms, curculios, peach-worms, grubs, etc., etc. There are many questions relating to the history of insects, about which eastern writers are in doubt, not at all doubtful with us.
1. Do the larvæ remain in the ground all the residue of the summer, and come forth only in the ensuing spring? In cold latitudes it may be so. Harris says, that they undergo their transformation in twenty days. Downing admits this of a few stragglers. But the main supply of bugs, he thinks, remains all summer and until spring, in the ground. But with us the curculio is not exclusively an early summer insect. It is found, in its appropriate haunts, through the whole warm season. Mr. Payne put plums containing the worms into a glass, and in eleven days obtained full-grown curculios. In cool regions they probably have but an annual generation; but in warm and
long summers, in the West, they reproduce often in each season.
2. The mode of ascent has been a matter of doubt. J. J. Thomas, in the Fruit Culturist says: “It has the power of using its wings in flying; but whether it crawls up the tree or ascends by flight, appears not to be certainly ascertained.”
Downing admits that it flies, but says, “How far this insect flies is yet a disputed point, some cultivators affirming that it scarcely goes further than a single tree, and others-believing that it flies over a whole neighborhood.”
Kenrick says: “They crawl up trees,” and he quotes an author as saying: “That of two trees standing so near each other as to touch, the fruit of one has been destroyed and the other has escaped; so little and so reluctantly do these insects incline to use their wings.” Dr. James Tilton says, in the “Domestic Encyclopedia,” that “they appear very reluctant to use their wings, and perhaps never employ them but when necessity compels them to migrate.”
It is true that the curculio, in cold and chilly weather, is disinclined to fly; but give it a right murderously hot day, and “McGregor’s on his native heath again.” Just before a thunder storm, in summer, in a still, sultry, sweltering day, they may be seen flying among the trees as blithely as any house-fly; alighting on your arm, or hand, and springing off again as nimbly as a flea.
All remedies founded on the idea of their crawling preferences will be signal failures. Troughs about trees, bats of wool, bandages of all kinds about the trunk to impede the ascent will be found as useful as would high fences to keep crows from a cornfield, or birds from the garden.
All remedies for this pest succeed to a charm where the curculio does not abound; and almost every one of them fails in places really infested them.
In cities, and in country places which are far removed