THE HARICOT-WEEVIL

The Life of the Weevil by Jean-Henri Fabre and Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE HARICOT-WEEVIL

Chapter XIII. THE HARICOT-WEEVIL

If there is a Heaven-sent vegetable on earth, it is the haricot bean. It has every good quality in its favour: it is soft to the tooth, of an agreeable flavour, plentiful, cheap and very nutritious. It is a vegetable flesh which, without being repulsive or dripping with blood, is as good as the cut-up horrors in the butcher’s shop. To emphasize its services to mankind, the Provençal idiom calls it gounflo-gus, the poor man’s bellows.1

Blessed bean, consoler of the poor, yes, you easily fill out the labourer, the honest and capable worker who has drawn the wrong number in life’s mad lottery; kindly bean, with three drops of oil and a dash of vinegar, you were the favourite dish of my boyhood; and even now, in the evening of my days, you are welcome to my humble porringer. We shall be friends to the last.

To-day it is not my intention to extol your deserts: I want to ask you a question, simply out of curiosity. [214]What is your country of origin? Did you come from Central Asia, with the horse-bean and the pea? Did you belong to the collection of seeds which the first pioneers of husbandry handed to us from their garden patch? Were you known to antiquity?

Here the insect, an impartial and well-informed witness, answers:

‘No, in our parts antiquity did not know the haricot. The precious legumen did not reach our country by the same road as the broad bean. It is a foreigner, introduced into the old continent at a later date.’

The insect’s statement merits serious examination, supported as it is by very plausible arguments. Here are the facts.

Though I have followed agricultural matters closely for many years, I have never seen the haricots attacked by any ravager whatever of the insect series, nor in particular by the Bruchi, the licensed despoilers of leguminous seeds.

I question my peasant neighbours on this point. They are men who keep a sharp look-out where their crops are concerned. To touch their property is a heinous crime, quickly discovered. Besides, there is the housewife, who would not fail to find the malefactor as she shells the haricots intended for the pot, conscientiously fingering them one by one before dropping them into a plate.[215]

Well, one and all reply to my question with a smile in which I read their disbelief in my knowledge of the smaller creatures:

‘Sir,’ they say, ‘learn that there are never any worms in the haricot. It is a blessed bean and respected by the Weevil. The pea, the broad bean, the lentil, the everlasting pea, the chick-pea, all have their vermin; this one, lou gounflo-gus, never. What should we poor people do if the Courcoussoun tried to rob us of it?’

The Curculio in fact despises it, displaying a very strange contempt when we consider the fervour with which the other legumina are attacked. All, down to the meagre lentil, are eagerly despoiled; and the haricot, so tempting both in size and in flavour, remains unharmed. It baffles the understanding. For what reason does the Bruchus, who passes without hesitation from the excellent to the indifferent and from the indifferent to the excellent, disdain this delicious seed? She leaves the everlasting pea for the green pea, she leaves the green pea for the broad bean and the vetch, accepting the niggardly scrap and the rich cake with equal satisfaction; and the attractions of the haricot leave her uninterested. Why?

Apparently because this legumen is unknown to her. The others, whether natives or acclimatized foreigners from the East, have been familiar to her for centuries; she tests their excellence [216]year by year and, relying on the lessons of the past, she bases her forethought for the future upon ancient custom. She suspects the haricot as a newcomer whose merits she has still to learn.

The insect tells us emphatically that the haricot is of recent date. It reached us from very far away, surely from the New World. Every edible thing attracts those whose business it is to make use of it. If the haricot had originated in the old continent, it would have had its licensed consumers, after the manner of the pea, the lentil and the others. The smallest leguminous seed, often no bigger than a pin’s head, feeds its Bruchus, a dwarf that nibbles it patiently and hollows it into a dwelling, whereas the plump and exquisite haricot is spared!

This strange immunity can have but one explanation: like the potato, like maize, the haricot is a present from the New World. It arrived in Europe unaccompanied by the insect that battens on it regularly in its native land; it found in our fields other seed-eaters, which, because they did not know it, despised it. In the same way, the potato and maize are respected over here, unless their American consumers are imported with them by accident.

The insect’s report is confirmed by the negative evidence of the ancient classics: the haricot never appears on the rustic table of their peasants. In [217]Virgil’s second Eclogue, Thestylis is preparing the reapers’ repast:

Thestylis et rapido fessis messoribus æstu

Allia serpyllumque herbas contundit olentes.2

The mixture is the equivalent of the aioli dear to the Provençal palate. It sounds very well in verse, but it lacks substance. On such an occasion men would prefer such solid fare as a dish of red haricots seasoned with chopped onions. Capital: that ballasts the stomach, while remaining just as countrified as garlic. Thus filled, in the open air, to the chirping of the Cicadæ, the gang of harvesters could take a brief mid-day nap and gently digest their meal in the shade of the sheaves. Our modern Thestyles, differing so little from their classic sisters, would take good care not to forget the gounflo-gus, that thrifty stand-by of big appetites. The Thestylis of the poet does not think of it, because she does not know it.

The same author shows us Tityrus offering a night’s hospitality to his friend Melibœus, who, driven from his property by the soldiers of Octavius, goes off limping behind his flock of goats.

‘We shall have chestnuts,’ says Tityrus, ‘cheese and fruits.’

History does not say if Melibœus allowed himself [218]to be tempted. It is a pity, for during the frugal meal we might have learnt, in a more explicit fashion, that the shepherds of olden time had to do without the haricot.

Ovid tells us, in a delightful passage, of the manner in which Philemon and Baucis welcomed the gods unawares as guests in their humble cottage. On the three-legged table steadied by means of a potsherd, they served cabbage-soup, rancid bacon, eggs turned for a moment over the hot cinders, cornelian cherries preserved in brine, honey and fruits. One dish is lacking amid this rustic magnificence, an essential dish which no Baucis of our country-side would ever forget. The bacon-soup would have been followed, inevitably, by a plateful of haricots. Why does Ovid, the poet so rich in details, fail to speak of the bean which would have looked so well on the bill of fare? The reply is the same: he cannot have known of it.

In vain do I go over the little that my reading has taught me of rustic food in ancient times: I have no recollection of the haricot. The stew-pots of the vine-dresser and the harvester tell me of the lupin, the broad bean, the pea, and the lentil; but they never mention the bean of beans.

The haricot has a reputation of another kind, a reputation more flatulent than flattering. You eat it and then, as the saying goes, the sooner you are off the better. It therefore lends itself [219]to the coarse jests loved by the rabble, especially when these are put into words by the shameless genius of an Aristophanes or a Plautus. What stage effects could have been produced by the merest allusion to the noisy bean, raising guffaws of laughter from the mariners of Athens or the street-porters of Rome! Did the two comic poets, in the unfettered gaiety of a language less reserved than ours, ever refer to the virtues of the haricot? Not once. They are quite silent on the subject of the sonorous bean.

The word haricot itself sets us thinking. It is an outlandish term, related to none of our expressions. Its turn of language, which is alien to our combinations of sounds, suggests to the mind some West-Indian jargon, as do caoutchouc and cocoa. Does the word, as a matter of fact, come from the American Redskins? Did we receive, together with the bean, the name by which it is called in its native country? Perhaps so; but how are we to know? Haricot, fantastic haricot, you set us a curious linguistic problem.

The Frenchman calls it also faséole, flageolet. The Provençal dubs it faïoù and favioù; the Catalan fayol; the Spaniard faseolo; the Portuguese feyâo; the Italian faguilo. Here I am on familiar ground: the languages of the Latin family have kept, with the inevitable terminal modifications, the ancient word faseolus.

Now, if I consult my dictionary, I find: faselus, [220]phaselus, faseolus, phaseolus, haricot. Learned vocabulary, permit me to tell you that your translation is wrong: phaselus or phaseolus cannot mean haricot. And the incontestable proof is in the Georgics3 where Virgil tells us the season at which to sow the faseolus. He says:

Si vero viciamque seres vilemque phaselum.…

Haud obscura cadens mittet tibi signa Bootes;

Incipe et ad medias sementem extende pruinas.4

Nothing is clearer than the teaching of the poet, who was wonderfully well-informed on agricultural matters: we must begin to sow the phaselus when the constellation Bootes disappears at sunset, that is to say, at the end of October, and continue doing so until the middle of the winter.

These conditions put the haricot out of the question: it is a chilly plant, which would not withstand the slightest frost. The winter would be fatal to it, even in the climate of the south of Italy. On the other hand, the pea, the broad bean, the everlasting pea and others, better able to resist the cold because of their country of origin, have nothing to fear from an autumn sowing and thrive during the winter, provided that the climate be fairly mild.[221]

What then does the phaselus of the Georgics stand for, that problematical bean which has handed down its name to the haricot in the Latin languages? Remembering the contemptuous epithet vilis with which the poet stigmatizes it, I feel inclined to look upon it as the chickling vetch, the coarse square pea, the jaisso despised by the Provençal peasant.

The problem of the haricot had reached this stage, almost elucidated by the insect’s evidence alone, when an unexpected document came and gave me the last word of the riddle. It is once more a poet—and a very famous poet—M. José Maria de Heredia,5 who comes to the naturalist’s aid. Without suspecting the service which he is rendering me, the village schoolmaster lends me a magazine6 in which I read the following conversation between the masterly chaser of sonnets and a lady journalist who asks him which of his works he prefers:

‘ “What would you have me say?” asks the poet. “You place me in a great difficulty.… I do not know which sonnet I like best: they all cost me terrible pains to write.… Which do you yourself prefer?”

‘ “How can I possibly make a choice, my dear master, out of so many jewels, each of which is [222]perfectly beautiful? You flash pearls, emeralds and rubies before my astonished eyes; how can I decide to prefer the emerald to the pearl? The whole necklace throws me into an ecstasy of admiration.”

‘ “Well, as for me, there is something of which I am prouder than of all my sonnets, something which has done more than my verses to establish my fame.”

‘I open my eyes wide:

‘ “What is that?” I ask.

‘The master gives me a mischievous glance; then, with that fine light in his eyes which fires his youthful features, he exclaims, triumphantly:

‘ “I have discovered the etymology of the word haricot.”

‘I was too much astounded even to laugh.

‘ “What I tell you is perfectly serious.”

‘ “My dear master, I knew your reputation for profound scholarship; but from that to imagining that you owed your fame to discovering the etymology of the word haricot: ah no, I should never have expected that! Can you tell me how you made the discovery?”

‘ “With pleasure. It was like this: I found some particulars about haricots when searching through a fine sixteenth-century work on natural history, Hernandez’ De Historia plantarum novi orbis. The word haricot was unknown in France until the seventeenth century: we used to say [223]fève or phaséol; in Mexican, ayacot. Thirty varieties of haricot were cultivated in Mexico before the conquest. They are called ayacot to this day, especially the red haricot, with black or violet spots. One day, at Gaston Paris’ house, I met a great scholar. On hearing my name, he rushed at me and asked if it was I who had discovered the etymology of the word haricot. He was absolutely ignorant of the fact that I had written poems and published Les Trophées.…” ’

What a glorious jest, to place the jewellery of his sonnets under the protection of a bean! I in my turn am delighted with the ayacot. How right I was to suspect that strange word haricot of being an American-Indian idiom! How truthful the insect was when it declared, in its own fashion, that the precious seed reached us from the New World! While retaining its first name, or something very nearly, the bean of Montezuma, the Aztec ayacot, found its way from Mexico to our kitchen-gardens.

But it came to us unaccompanied by the insect which is its titular consumer, for there must certainly be a Weevil in its native country which levies tribute on the generous bean. Our indigenous nibblers of seeds have disowned the foreigner; they have not yet had time to become familiar with it and to appreciate its merits; they have prudently refrained from touching the ayacot, which aroused suspicion because of its novelty. [224]Until our own days, therefore, the Mexican bean remained unharmed, differing curiously in this from our other legumina, all of which are eagerly devoured by the Weevil.

This state of things could not last. If our fields do not contain the haricot-loving insect, the New World knows it well. In the ordinary way of commercial exchange, some sack of worm-eaten beans was bound to bring it to Europe. The invasion was inevitable.

Indeed, according to data in my possession, it seems recently to have taken place. Three or four years ago, I received from Maillanne, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, what I was vainly seeking in my neighbourhood, although I cross-examined both farmers and housewives, astonishing them greatly by my questions. No one had ever seen the pest of the haricots; no one had ever heard of it. Friends who knew of my inquiries sent me from Maillanne, as I have said, the wherewithal to satisfy fully my curiosity as a naturalist. It consisted of a bushel of haricots outrageously spoilt, riddled with holes, changed into a sort of sponge and swarming inside with innumerable Bruchi, which recalled the Lentil-weevil by their diminutive size.

The senders told me of the damage suffered at Maillanne. The odious insect, they said, had destroyed the best part of the crop. A veritable plague, the like of which had never been known [225]before, had fallen upon the haricots, leaving the housekeeper hardly any with which to garnish her stew. Of the culprit’s habits, of its way of going to work, nothing was known. It was for me to find out this by experiment.

Quick, then, let us experiment! Circumstances favour me. We are in the middle of June; and I have in the garden a row of early haricots, black Belgian haricots, sown for cooking-purposes. Though it mean sacrificing the precious vegetable, let us loose the terrible destroyer on the mass of verdure. The development of the plant is at just the right stage, if I may go by what the Pea-weevil has already shown me: there are plenty of flowers and also of pods, still green and of all sizes.

I put two or three handfuls of my Maillanne haricots in a plate and place the swarming mass full in the sunlight on the edge of my bed of beans. I can imagine what will happen. The insects which are free and those which the stimulus of the sun will soon set free will take to their wings. Finding the fostering plant close by, they will stop and take possession of it. I shall see them exploring the pods and flowers and I shall not have long to wait before I witness the laying. That is how the Pea-weevil would act under similar conditions.

Well, no: to my confusion, matters do not fall out as I foresaw. For a few minutes the [226]insects bustle about in the sunlight, opening and closing their wing-cases to ease the mechanism of flight; then one by one they fly off. They mount high in the luminous air; they grow smaller and smaller and are soon lost to view. My persevering attention meets with not the slightest success: not one of the fly-aways settles on the haricots.

After tasting the joys of liberty to the full, will they return this evening, to-morrow, the day after? No, they do not return. All the week, at favourable hours, I inspect the rows of beans, flower by flower, pod by pod; never a Weevil do I see, never an egg. And yet it is a propitious time of year, for at this moment the mothers imprisoned in my jars are laying their eggs profusely on the dry haricots.

Let us try at another season. I have two other beds which I have had sown with the late haricot, the red cocot, partly for the use of the household, but principally for the sake of the Weevils. Arranged in convenient rows, the two beds will yield their crops one in August, the other in September and later.

I repeat with the red haricot the experiment which I made with the black. On several occasions, at opportune times, I release into the tangle of verdure large numbers of Bruchi from my glass jars, the general depot. Each time the result is plainly negative. In vain, all through the season, [227]I repeat my almost daily search, until both the crops are exhausted: I can never discover a single colonized pod, nor even a single Weevil perched upon the plant.

And yet this is not for lack of watching. My family are enjoined not to touch any part of certain rows which I reserve for my purposes; they are told to mind the eggs which might occur on the pods gathered. I myself examine the beans brought from my own or the neighbouring gardens, before handing them to the housekeeper to be shelled. All my trouble is wasted: there is nowhere a trace of any laying.

To these experiments in the open air I add others under glass. I place in long, narrow flasks fresh pods hanging from their stalks, some green, others mottled with crimson and containing seeds which are nearly ripe. Each flask receives its complement of Weevils. This time I obtain eggs, but they do not inspire me with much hope: the mother has laid them on the sides of the flasks and not on the pods. No matter: they hatch. For a few days I see the grubs roaming about, exploring the pods and the glass with equal zeal. In the end they all die, from the first to the last, without touching the food provided.

The conclusion to be drawn is obvious: the young and tender haricot is not the thing for them. Unlike the Pea-weevil, the Haricot-weevil refuses to entrust her family to beans that are not hardened [228]by age and desiccation; she declines to stop on my seed-patch, because she does not find the provisions which she requires.

Then what does she want? She wants old, hard beans, which clatter on the ground like little pebbles. I will satisfy her. I place in my flasks some very hard, tough pods, which have been long dried in the sun. This time the family prospers; the grubs bore through the parched shell, reach the seeds, enter them; and henceforth all goes well as well can be.

To all appearances, this is how the Weevil invades the farmer’s granary. Some haricots are left standing in the fields until both plants and pods, baked by the sun, are perfectly dry. This will make them easier to beat in order to separate the beans. It is now that the Weevil, finding things as she wants them, begins her laying. By getting in his crop a little late, the peasant gets the marauder into the bargain.

But the Bruchus attacks more especially the seeds in our stores. Copying the Corn-weevil, who eats the wheat in our granaries and disregards the cereal swaying in the ear, in the same way she abhors the tender bean and prefers to make her home in the peace and darkness of our warehouses. She is a formidable enemy of the corn-chandler rather than of the farmer.

What a fury of destruction, once the ravager is installed amidst our hoards of beans! My [229]flasks proclaim the fact aloud. A single haricot-bean harbours a numerous family, often as many as twenty. And not only one generation exploits it, but quite three or four in the year. So long as any edible matter remains within the skin, so long do new consumers settle down in it, until in the end the haricot becomes a loathsome sugar-plum stuffed with stercoral droppings. The skin, which the grubs refuse to eat, is a sack pierced with round holes numbering as many as the inhabitants that have left it; the contents yield to the pressure of the finger and spread into a disgusting paste of floury excreta. The bean is a complete wreck.

The Pea-weevil, living alone in its seed, eats only enough to make a little hollow for the nymph. The rest remains intact, so that the pea is able to sprout and can even serve as food, if we dismiss any unreasonable repugnance from our mind. The American insect does not exercise this self-restraint: it empties its haricot entirely, leaving a skinful of filth which I have seen refused by the pigs. America does not do things by halves when she sends us her plagues of insects. We had to thank her for the Phylloxera, the disastrous Louse against whom our vine-growers wage incessant war; and now we have to thank her for the Haricot-weevil, a serious future menace. A few experiments will give us an idea of the danger.

For nearly three years there have stood, on the table of my insect laboratory, some dozens of jars [230]and bottles closed with gauze covers which prevent escape, while permitting constant ventilation. These are the cages containing my wild animals. In them I rear the Haricot-weevil, varying the diet as I please. They teach me among other things that the insect, far from being exclusive in the choice of its establishments, will make itself at home in our different legumina, with very few exceptions.

All the haricots suit it, whether black or white, red or striped, small or large, those of the last crop or those many years old and almost too hard to boil. The loose beans are attacked by preference, as being less troublesome to invade; but, when there are no shelled beans available, those covered by their natural sheath are just as zealously exploited. The new-born grubs are well able to reach them through the pod, which is often as stiff as parchment. This is how the beans are raided in the fields.

Another highly-appreciated bean is the long-podded dolichos, known among our people as lou faioù borgné, the one-eyed haricot, because of the dark speck which gives the umbilicus the look of a black eye. I even fancy that my boarders show a marked predilection for this bean.

So far, there is nothing abnormal: the Bruchus has not gone beyond the botanical genus Phaseolus. But here is something that increases the danger and shows us the phaseolus-lover in an unexpected [231]light. The Bruchus accepts without the least hesitation the dried pea, the broad bean, the everlasting pea, the vetch, the chick-pea; she passes from one to the other, always satisfied; her family live and prosper in all these legumina as well as they do in the haricot. Only the lentil is refused, perhaps because of its insufficient size. What a dread robber this American Weevil is!

The evil would become still greater if, as I feared at first, the ever-greedy insect passed from leguminous seeds to cereals. This it does not do. When installed in my jars with a heap of wheat, barley, rice or maize, the Bruchus invariably dies without offspring. The result is the same with horny seeds, such as coffee-beans; with oleaginous seeds, such as those of the castor-oil-plant or of the sunflower. Nothing outside the legumina suits the Bruchus. Notwithstanding these limitations, its portion is a very extensive one; and it uses and abuses it with the utmost energy.

The eggs are white and drawn out into a tiny cylinder. They are scattered anyhow and anywhere. The mother lays them either singly or in little groups, on the sides of the jar as well as on the haricots. Her heedlessness is such that she will even fasten them to maize, castor-oil-seeds, coffee-beans or other seeds, on which the family are doomed soon to perish, finding no food to their liking. What is the use of maternal foresight here? Left no matter where, under the heaps of beans, [232]the eggs are always well-placed, for it is the new-born grubs’ business to seek and find the spots at which to effect an entrance.

The egg hatches in five days at most. Out of it comes a tiny white creature, with a red head. It is a mere speck, just visible to the naked eye. The grub is swollen in front, to give more strength to its tool, the chisel of its mandibles, which has to break through the tough seed, hard as wood. The larvæ of the Buprestes and the Capricorns, which tunnel through the trunks of trees, are similarly shaped. As soon as it is born, the crawling worm makes off at random, with an activity which we should hardly expect in one so young. It roams about, anxious to find board and lodging as soon as possible.

It attains its object, for the most part, within the twenty-four hours. I see the worm making a hole in the tough skin of the seed; I watch its efforts; I catch sight of it half-sunk in the beginning of a gallery whose entrance is dusty with white flour, the refuse from the boring. It works its way in and penetrates into the heart of the seed. Its evolution is so rapid that it will emerge in the adult form in five weeks’ time.

This hasty development permits several generations to take place in the course of the year. I have seen four. On the other hand, an isolated couple supplied me with a family of eighty. Let us consider only half this number, to allow for the [233]two sexes, which I take to be equally represented. At the end of the year, the couples resulting from this source will therefore be represented by the fourth power of forty, reaching in terms of larvæ the frightful total of over two and a half millions. What a heap of haricots such a legion would destroy!

The larva’s methods remind us at all points of what the Pea-weevil showed us. Each grub digs itself a cell in the floury mass, while respecting the skin in the form of a protective disk, which the adult will easily be able to push out at the moment of leaving. Towards the end of the larval phase, the cells show through on the surface of the bean as so many dark circles. At last the lid falls off, the insect leaves its cell and the haricot remains pierced with as many holes as it had grubs feeding on it.

Very frugal, satisfied with a few floury scraps, the adults seem not at all anxious to abandon the heap so long as beans worth exploiting remain. They mate in the interstices of the stack; the mothers scatter their eggs at random; the young grubs make themselves at home, some in the untouched haricots, some in the beans that are holed but not yet exhausted; and the swarming is repeated every five weeks throughout the summer, after which the last generation, the one born in September or October, slumbers in its cells till the return of the warm weather.[234]

If ever the spoiler of the haricots became too ominously threatening, it would not be very difficult to wage a war of extermination upon her. We know from her habits the best tactics to follow. She ravages the dry and gathered crop, stored in the granaries. It is an irksome matter to attend to her in the open fields; and it is also almost useless. The bulk of her business is conducted elsewhere, in our warehouses. The enemy settles down under our roof, within our reach. This being so, with the aid of insecticides defence becomes relatively easy.

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