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Updated: May 18, 2025
The Bruchus pisi, a solitary hermit, consumes only so much of the pea as will leave a cell for the nymph; the rest remains intact, so that the pea may be sown, or it will even serve as food, if we can overcome our repugnance. The American insect knows nothing of these limitations; it empties the haricot completely and leaves a skinful of filth that I have seen the pigs refuse.
Within them swarmed innumerable weevils, which recalled, by their diminutive size, the lentil-weevil, Bruchus lenti. The senders told me of the loss experienced at Maillane. The odious little creature, they said, had destroyed the greater portion of the harvest.
Nothing outside the bean family is of any use to the Bruchus. Thus limited, its portion is none the less considerable, and it uses and abuses it with the utmost energy. The eggs are white, slender, and cylindrical. There is no method in their distribution, no choice in their deposition. The mother lays them singly or in little groups, on the walls of the jar as well as on the haricots.
Unlike the Bruchus pisi, the female of the haricot-weevil refuses to trust her family to beans that are not hardened by age and desiccation; she refused to settle on my bean-patch because the food she required was not to be found there. What does she require? Evidently the mature, dry, hard haricot, which falls to earth with the sound of a small pebble. I hasten to satisfy her.
If the Bruchus is really a stranger, let us regard the bean as the original food-plant; if indigenous, the large vetch. Sometime in the remote past we received the pea, growing it at first in the prehistoric vegetable garden which already supplied the bean. It was found a better article of diet than the broad bean, which to-day, after such good service, is comparatively neglected.
The Bruchus knows neither the fatigues of the laborious, obliged to limit the size of her family, nor the misfortunes of the parasite, obliged to produce an exaggerated number of offspring.
The industry of the larvæ reminds us at every point what we have learned from the Bruchus pisi. Each grub excavates a lodging in the mass of the bean, respecting the epidermis, and preparing a circular trap-door which the adult can easily open with a push at the moment of emergence.
I was anxious to see the female Bruchus at work in her quality of Curculionid, as our classification declares her. The other weevils are Rhyncophora, beaked insects, armed with a drill with which to prepare the hole in which the egg is laid. The Bruchus possesses only a short snout or muzzle, excellently adapted for eating soft tissues, but valueless as a drill.
The abundance of food balances the prodigal fertility of the mother. If the Bruchus were always to adopt the broad bean for the establishment of her family I could well understand the exuberant allowance of eggs to one pod; a rich food-stuff easily obtained evokes a large batch of eggs. But the case of the pea perplexes me.
On the bean and the vetch the Bruchus founded colonies in which the infant mortality was low. There was room for all. On the pea-vine, delicious though its fruits may be, the greater part of its offspring die of starvation. The rations are few, and the hungry mouths are multitudinous. We will linger over this problem no longer.
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