“I don’t care,” said the rove beetle. “I hate to be misunderstood. We are useful too. I heard a man call us scavengers. I don’t know what it means, but something good, I am sure, from the way he said it. I must be going soon. It is so dry here. You know my home is in damp places under stones or leaves.”
“You may go when you wish,” answered the elater. “We are still on the main issue. As I said before, we are beetles, and there is no reason to take us for bugs. Calm yourself, Mrs. Potato Bug. We have no sucking beak as the bugs have, but we have two sets of horny jaws, which move sideways, and not up and down. These are to bite roots, stems, and leaves of plants, so most of our order live on vegetable food and are enemies to the farmer, but some of us are his friends, for we eat the insects that injure his crops. Our children are called grubs. Some of them make a sort of glue, with which they stick together earth or bits of wood for a cocoon; others make tunnels in tree trunks or wood and transform in them. We may well be proud, for we belong to a large and beautiful order, and we are found in all parts of the world. We are divided into two sub-orders—true beetles and snout beetles. I hope our cousins, the snout beetles, will not be offended. They are real in a way.”
“The farmer and fruit grower think so anyway,” said a little weevil. “We have been called bugs just because we have a snout, but any one can see at a glance that it isn’t a bug’s snout. It is not a tube at all, but has tiny jaws at the tip.”
“I don’t believe I could see all that,” said Ruth rather timidly, for these clever little people had a way of making her feel she knew very little.
“Maybe you can’t,” was the short answer, “and I dare say you can’t tell how we use our snouts either. We punch holes with them in plums, peaches, cherries, and other fruits, not to mention nuts and the bark of trees. I am a peach curculio, but that is not important. We all work in the same way—that is, drop an egg in the hole made by our snout, then use the snout again to push the egg down. Mrs. Plum Weevil is busy now in the plum orchard back of us; so of course she couldn’t come to this meeting. ‘Duty before pleasure,’ she said. She will lay eggs in quite a number of plums, and the plums will drop from the trees before they are ripe.”
“And there’ll be a lump of gum on them!” cried Ruth, clapping her hands.
The weevil looked at her with approval. “You do notice some things,” she said.
“The gum oozes out of the hole made by our snouts. Of course our egg hatches inside the fruit, and the baby has its dinner all around it. As it hasn’t a leg to walk on——”
“Dear! dear!” sighed the elater. “You seem to forget that we are trying to keep to the main issue. As I said before——”
“You are always saying what you said before,” snapped Mrs. Sawyer.