“That worm, my lad,” he began, “as I have already briefly explained, is the grub or larva of a small moth.”
“Seems to me,” interrupted Jules, “the moth is responsible for a good deal of mischief.”
“Yes, moths do more harm than any other insects; but not as moths, for these never give us any cause for complaint, being content to suck a little honey through their slender trumpet from the flowers growing on every side. It is in the larva state, with appetites of the most varied sort, that they commit their ravages. I have already told you about worms that gnaw wood and those that eat woolen stuffs, those that browse the foliage and those that attack roots. Now we come to some that give their attention to fruit.
“The best-known of these is the worm that lives in apples and pears. We usually call it the apple-worm, and its moth is known as the apple-pyralis. The term pyralis is new to you; it comes from a [[359]]Greek word meaning fire, and was long ago ignorantly applied to the apple-moth because that insect was supposed to eat fire as its regular diet. Its forward wings are ash-gray streaked crosswise with brown and ornamented at the tip with a large red spot encircled by a golden-red border. The rear wings are brown. When the fruit is just beginning to form, the pyralis lays an egg in the blossom end of apple or pear, no matter which, and the little worm that soon comes from this egg takes up its abode close to the seeds. The narrow channel by which it entered skins over so that the wormy fruit appears intact for some time. Meanwhile the worm is living in the lap of luxury, with an abundance of its favorite food all around; but it must have a passage communicating with the outside so as to get air and make the abode sanitary, encumbered as it is with refuse and excrement. Accordingly the worm bores a little tunnel through the flesh of the fruit to the skin and through this also; there the tunnel ends in a round hole. Through this passageway the larva receives fresh air and throws out from time to time the chewed and digested pulp, in the form familiar to us as reddish wormhole dust. The translucent quality of its skin causes the worm to vary in hue according to the color of what it eats, being sometimes white, sometimes brown or yellow, and sometimes pink. It is ornamented with little black tubercles or pimples arranged in pairs. The head and the first ring-like section of the body are brown.
“Apples and pears containing worms continue to [[360]]grow; indeed, they ripen sooner than the others, but it is a sickly maturity that hastens the fall of the fruit. As a rule, the larva in wormy fruit that has fallen to the ground is by that time fully grown; accordingly, it leaves its domicile by the passage already made and creeps into some crevice in the bark of a tree, or sometimes it retires underground, after which it makes for itself a shell of silk mixed with fragments of wood or dead leaves, and turns into a moth the next year, when all the young apples and pears are ready to receive its eggs for the new generation.
“In plums and apricots is found a worm closely resembling that infesting apples and pears; another occurs in chestnuts, and a third in pea-pods, the tender young peas furnishing excellent food for the intruder. All these worms are the larvæ of moths commonly named from the fruit or vegetable they infest. The pea-worm, after it has devoured the best part of the pod’s contents, passes into another pod by boring a round hole. Its moth appears in June, and the larva in July and August. Consequently, spring peas are never wormy, while those of late summer very often are. This example shows you how, in certain instances, a crop can be saved by hastening or delaying the sowing, according to the time when the ravagers may be expected to appear.”
“But no such plan can be carried out with chestnuts,” said Emile. “That is plain enough, for chestnut-trees bear their nuts at a fixed time, and we [[361]]can’t hurry them up or keep them back. The chestnut-moth comes just when the table is set for its young ones. What disgusting-looking worms they are, too—all red and soaked in their own juice in the chestnut-meat!”
“We can’t do anything, either, for the apple-trees and the pear-trees, can we?” Louis inquired.
“Not much. Some people gather the wormy apples and pears fallen from or still on the trees, and crush them to kill the worms inside. That makes so many enemies the fewer for the following year; but again it has to be admitted that, left to our own resources, we could never defend ourselves against the pyralis and other similar moths that produce larvæ from which hardly anything is safe. Fortunately the swallow catches these moths on the wing, bats chase them assiduously in the twilight, and the little gray lizard snaps them up when they alight on the trunks of trees. These are so many friends, protectors of our gardens and orchards.”
“The moths you call by that queer name, pyralis—are there a good many of them?” asked Jules.