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Now the superior volume of the broad bean, which is almost as much beloved by the weevil as the pea, can lodge a considerable community, and the solitary can live as a cenobite. Without encroaching on the domain of their neighbours, five or six or more can find room in the one bean.
It is worth recalling that their diet includes such pests as the Rocky Mountain locust and other injurious grasshoppers, the army worm, cutworms, cabbage worms, cotton worm, cotton cutworm, boll weevil, clover leaf weevil, clover root curculio, rice weevil, corn bill-bugs, wireworms, corn leaf-beetles, cucumber beetles, white grubs, and such foes of stock as the Texas fever tick, horseflies, and mosquitoes.
Who would think of connecting two creatures so unlike, of calling them by the same name? Outside the professional classifiers, no one would dare to. The Cerceris, more perspicacious, knows each of them for a Weevil, a quarry with a concentrated nervous system, lending itself to the surgical feat of her single stroke of the lancet.
It proved, when it came, to be detestable; I could not put it to my lips; and Bellairs, who had as much palate as a weevil, was left to finish it himself.
Knowledge is well worth a few beans. Among other things, knowledge tells us: "The seedsman need not go to the expense of waging war upon the weevil. When the peas arrive in the granary, the harm is already done; it is irreparable, but not transmissible. The untouched peas have nothing to fear from the neighborhood of those which have been attacked, however long the mixture is left.
However far withdrawn into the centre of the pea, the Bruchus, whether larvae or nymph, is reached by the long oviduct. It receives an egg in its tender flesh, and the thing is done. Without possibility of defence, since it is by now a somnolent grub or a helpless pupa, the embryo weevil is eaten until nothing but skin remains.
You'd be as rich as kings if you could find it, and you know it's here, and you stand there skulking. There wasn't one of you dared face Bill, and I did it a blind man! And I'm to lose my chance for you! I'm to be a poor, crawling beggar, sponging for rum, when I might be rolling in a coach! If you had the pluck of a weevil in a biscuit you would catch them still."
"Only a weevil, the Lixus," which he is observing in a cage, "continues, step by step, without the slightest emotion, his amorous by-play, as though nothing unusual were happening...The nightingale and the skylark may be silent, oppressed by fear; the bee may re-enter her hive; but is a weevil to be upset because the sun threatens to go out?"
Unhappily for the pressed man, there was a weevil in his daily bread. Nor were these the only disabilities the pressed man laboured under. His officers proved a sore trial to him. The Earl of Pembroke, Lord High Admiral, foreseeing that this would be the case, directed that he should be "used with all possible tenderness and humanity." The order was little regarded.
The weevil was of the same opinion as man, and without entirely forgetting the bean and the vetch it established the greater part of its tribe upon the pea, which from century to century was more widely cultivated. To-day we have to share our peas; the Bruchidae take what they need, and bestow their leavings on us.
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