50
THE BEAN BEETLE IN ESSEX.
bean. In either case such beans, or those exhibiting the much more
readily discerned holes from which the Bruchi have emerged, should
be condemned as unfit for seed.1
Grinding the seed for flour is not necessarily fatal to the beetles ;
Mr. Thomas J. Bold relates of a cargo of 1,000 quarters of Sicilian
beans, imported in September, 1850, which was much infested with
Bruchus rufimanus, that "some of the miller's men were much
astonished to find the meal, after passing through the stones,
apparently alive, and the 'queer flies,' as they termed them, taking
wing and flying about the mill in thousands" ("Zoologist" ix., 3,290).
Mr. Theodore Wood has lately published the result of certain
experiments made with the view of determining the amount of injury
occasioned by sowing Brichus-infested seed (See "Entomologists'
Monthly Magazine" xxii., 114, and Trans. Ent. Soc. London, 1886,
page 375). The experiments were made in 1885 and 1886, and
although by no means conclusive, or altogether satisfactory, Mr.
Wood found that "the total produce of four out of the five varieties
experimented upon was so greatly diminished as to leave no possible
ground for doubt that the presence of the weevil in the seed is highly
detrimental, affecting to a very considerable degree the reproductive
powers of the future plant." The "Early Mazagan," presumably
the hardiest variety, was the only kind practically unaffected by the
damage caused to the seed.
"Kirby and Spence" tell us, on the authority of Amoreux, "that
an alarm was spread in some parts of France in 1780, that people had
been poisoned by eating 'worm-eaten' peas, and they were forbidden
by authority to be exposed for sale in the market" (Introduction to
Entomology, 1st ed. i., 175; popular ed., page 90). These "worm-
eaten" peas were attacked by Bruchus pisi. Curtis received the
following communication from Mr. Longbottom, Secretary to the
Royal Polytechnic Institution, in December, 1845:—"I have been
requested by the Bishop of Norwich to forward for your inspection
the accompanying sample of beans, lately brought from Sicily. They
were purchased by a cabriolet proprietor for his horses, but finding
that the health of the animals was much deranged from feeding on
them, they were carefully examined and almost all of them found to
contain an insect (Bruchus)" ("Farm Insects," page 363). The
1 It is a noteworthy circumstance that, judging from general experience and Mr. Wood's
experiments referred to by Mr. Fitch later on, the larvae of the beetles do not destroy the vital
part (embryo) of the seed ; they appear to feed simply on the nutritive matter stored up in the
cotyledons of the bean.—Ed.