“Oh, the pretty little thing!” cried Emile. “What can it do with its beautiful clothes?”
“Nothing to our advantage, my boy. Fine clothes do not make useful citizens, either among insects or among men. The bee’s dress is a modest brown, and the bee works at honey-making; the dress of the weevil I show you here is very handsome, but the elegant creature lives at our expense. If you have in your garden any fine plums or pears or apples, it gets ahead of you in harvesting the crop; it does not even wait for the fruit to ripen, so fearful is it of being too late. In June it punctures with its pointed snout the young apple or pear or plum and lays an egg in the unripe flesh. The fruit thus treated feeds the larva for some time, and then dries up and falls off. Then the worm emigrates, leaves the plum that has nourished it, and buries itself in [[316]]the ground to reappear the next spring as a perfect insect.”
“I should like to know the name of this plum-pricker; I’d teach it to behave if I got hold of it.”
“It is called, very inappropriately, the rhynchites bacchus.”
“Bacchus, if I remember rightly,” said Jules, “is the god of wine.”
“Exactly; and that is where the word is out of place here. No doubt the first observers confounded the weevil of our orchards with that of our vineyards, giving to the former the name that should belong to the latter. But the mistake has been made and we can’t do anything about it now. Let us keep the names as they are, but not confound the two weevils so different in appearance and habits. The weevil that rolls the vine leaves is hairless and of a golden-green color; the other is all covered with hairs and its color is a lustrous violet. To avoid confusion in our talk, why should we not call this latter insect the plum-weevil, or the pear-weevil?”
“That would be a good name for it,” assented Louis.
“I shall just call it the plum-pricker,” declared Emile.
“There is no reason why you should not,” his uncle agreed. “Now let us pass on to another member of the family. See what widely dissimilar habits there are in a group of insects in which the expert eye can nevertheless perceive close resemblances, I might almost say a near relationship. [[317]]Some roll grape or oak or poplar leaves; others puncture fruit with the beak; this one here that I am going to tell you about severs—partly, never wholly—the tips of young and tender shoots of various fruit-trees. Hence they are commonly known as bud-cutters. It is a weevil, but much smaller than that of the grapevine. The adjective conical is given to it on account of the shape of its thorax or breastplate, which tapers a little toward the front like a sugar-loaf. It is rather lustrous and of a blue color shading into green.
“It shows remarkable cleverness in its operations. Establishing itself in spring on a pear, cherry, apricot, plum, or hawthorn tree, indifferently, it selects one by one the shoots that suit it, and in the not yet unfolded terminal bud it bores with its beak a tiny hole, in which it lays an egg. But it appears that the young larva requires a diet especially prepared for it, one that is slightly decomposed, and not the bitter juices of the vigorously growing shoot. Have not we ourselves similar tastes? Do we eat medlars and sorb-apples just as they come from the tree? No indeed; they must first be left to ripen on straw, even to decay a little.”