THE JUNE-BUG

Field, Forest and Farm by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE JUNE-BUG

CHAPTER XLVII. THE JUNE-BUG

“It is a discovery of no small importance in your eyes, my young friends, when you find the first June-bug of the season on the young foliage. In the evening you get together in a corner and talk about it, you make plans for the morrow, and all your conversation is about the June-bug that has just arrived. You arrange to get up early the next day and shake the trees in order to bring down the sleeping insects; you get ready a box, pierced with holes, to receive the captives, and put in a handful of fresh leaves for them to feed on.

June-bug

“At the first streak of dawn you are up; you visit the willows, the poplars, the hawthorn hedges wet with dew. It is a fruitful hunt: the June-bugs, benumbed by the chill of night, fall like hail when you shake the branches. Soon you have a half a score of them, then a dozen, then twenty. It is enough. You go back to the house with your prisoners fluttering and struggling in the foot of an old stocking, in your [243]handkerchief, or in your cap. You bring a supply of green leaves.

“And now for your experiments! You tie a long string to the leg of one of the beetles and put the insect in the sun. It inflates and deflates its belly, raises its wing-sheaths, and expands its wings. There it goes, into the air. Your experiment has succeeded. These delights of the June-bug season, my children—enjoy them as long as you can. Other pleasures pale beside them. In view of the amusement it affords you I gladly welcome the June-bug. But turn now to a less pleasing aspect of the matter.

“Like every other insect, the June-bug is at first a grub. In that form it lives three years in the ground, whereas in its final state, when it is found on trees and bushes, it lives but two or three weeks. This grub or larva is commonly called the white grub, also the fish-worm, and sometimes the ground-hog. Look at it carefully for a moment and tell me what you see.”

“I see,” answered Louis, “a fat, big-bellied worm, slow in its movements, and fond of lying curled up on its side. It is of a whitish color with a yellowish head.”

“Yes, and what else?”

“It has six legs, not made for running on the surface of the ground, but for crawling underneath; and it has strong jaws for biting the roots of plants. Its head is capped with horn to help it in boring through the soil.”

“Very good,” was Uncle Paul’s approving comment; [244]“and you see how the stomach is distended with food, which shows in a darker tint through the white skin of the paunch. So gorged is the worm, in fact, that it cannot stand on its legs, but lies lazily on its side.

“For three years this fat grub lives under ground, always under ground, tunneling like a mole in all directions, and living on roots. Then it makes for itself a little chamber out of earth, very smooth inside, and shuts itself up there; after which it proceeds to transform itself into a nymph, and then into a June-bug. Everything serves it for food: the roots of grass and of trees, of cereals and of fodder, of vegetables and of flowers. In winter it buries itself deep in the ground and becomes torpid; at the approach of spring it returns to the upper layers of the soil, installs itself among the roots, and goes from plant to plant, leaving devastation in its path. You have, let us suppose, a fine bed of lettuce in your garden. From no apparent cause, some morning, you find it all withered. You pull up one of the plants, and it proves to have no root; the white grub has cut it away. Or you have a nursery of young fruit trees for your orchard. The terrible worm passes that way, and your nursery is good for nothing but fire-wood. Or you have sown several acres with wheat or rape, you have made a considerable outlay for fertilizer and labor; but there is promise of a handsome harvest with large profit to you. The larva of the June-bug works its way up from the depths, and then good-bye to your harvest; the stalks [245]dry up as they stand, having no roots left to sustain them. When this formidable worm invades a country, famine would surely follow were it not that traffic facilities make possible the speedy importation of provisions from other lands. We live in a progressive age and, thanks to the means of transport and to the briskness of trade, people do not die of hunger in a province whose fields have been devastated by the white grub. They do not die of hunger, but what woe follows in the wake of the devouring larva! Year in and year out, it destroys millions of francs’ worth of crops in France alone.

“The multitude of these little insects is truly terrifying. When they invade a field, the earth, undermined in all directions, loses its firmness and yields under the pressure of the foot. One year, in the department of the Sarthe, the ravages became so serious that it was necessary to undertake a systematic destruction of the pest. The June-bug was hunted on a large scale, and sixty thousand decaliters were gathered in, each decaliter containing about five thousand insects. Thus the total number taken amounted to three hundred millions. To give you some idea of the immensity of this number I will add that if you should try to count those three hundred million insects, one by one, it would take you more than twenty years, working ten hours a day.

“In the department of the Lower Seine there was at one time found to be an average of twenty-three larvæ of the June-bug to the square meter, or two hundred and thirty thousand devourers to each hectare. [246]A hectare will raise a crop of one hundred thousand beets. Thus each beet was gnawed by at least two worms. Allowing eighty thousand rape-stalks to the hectare, we find each stalk feeding three worms, or very nearly. It is clear that under these desperate conditions no rape-seed oil or beet-root sugar can be produced. Every plant perishes. In the single year 1866 the Lower Seine lost from this cause about twenty-five million francs.

“In 1868, in different parts of France, notably in Normandy, the multiplication of June-bugs was so great as to spread alarm throughout the rural districts. Trees were completely stripped of their foliage, and in the evening, when the insects fly abroad, such clouds of them encumbered the atmosphere as to make it difficult to walk about. Almost everywhere there were June-bug hunts organized, and those who gathered the insects received from the public treasury from four to six francs per hundred liters. In one place alone, Fontaine-Mallet, near Havre, there were gathered four thousand and fifty-nine kilograms of the insects in four days. The school-master sent his pupils out after June-bugs, and four hundred and forty kilograms was the result of one day’s collecting. All these insects were carted to Havre by the wagon-load and drowned in the sea. In certain communes they were brought to the town hall in such quantities that there was no way of disposing of them. The air reeked with the stench they made.

“It is said that in 1668 the June-bugs destroyed all [247]the vegetation in one county of Ireland, so that the country presented the dead appearance of winter. The sound made by the insects’ mandibles in browsing the foliage of the trees was like that of a carpenter’s saw, and the hum of wings resembled the distant beating of drums. Enveloped in clouds of insects and blinded by the living hail, the inhabitants could hardly see to go about. The famine was horrible: the poor Irish people were even obliged to eat the June-bugs to keep from starving.”

“Oh, how awful that must have been!” exclaimed the group of listeners.

“Yes, awful, indeed,” assented Uncle Paul, “and I have a few more instances to relate, less lamentable than the Irish famine, it is true, but still of a nature to show us how prodigious were the legions of June-bugs in certain years. In 1832, in the neighborhood of Gisors, a stage-coach became enveloped at nightfall in a cloud of these insects. Blinded and terrified, the horses obstinately refused to go on. Finally there was nothing to do but turn about and go back, so completely did the humming swarm bar the way. Forty years ago the June-bugs descended upon Mâcon after ravaging the vineyards in its vicinity. They were scooped up in the streets by the shovelful, and to make one’s way through the cloud of beetles one had to clear a passage by the energetic brandishing of a stick.

“Since the June-bug is so redoubtable a scourge to agriculture, since it is a foe with which one must reckon most seriously, how, you will ask, is it to be [248]got rid of? There is one way, and only one: collecting and destroying both grubs and beetles. We can count to a certain extent on the help of moles, hedge-hogs, ravens, crows, and magpies, all of which hunt the larvæ, especially in newly ploughed fields; and we can also count on the aid of a host of birds such as shrikes, sparrows, and others, which devour the beetles; but the number of the enemy is so great that this destruction by natural means does not always suffice. We must then lend an energetic hand ourselves. Which of the two is to enjoy the fruits of the earth, man or June-bug? Man, if he will but bestir himself and wage unceasing war on both the insect and its larva.

“The white grub, as I told you, bores into the earth more or less deeply according to the season. In winter it goes down half a meter, a depth at which it is protected from the frost. Upon the return of milder weather it comes up again, to be within reach of the roots; and from the first of April it can be found by digging down twenty centimeters. A favorable time, therefore, is chosen for turning up the earth and bringing the larvæ to the surface, whereupon women and children, following after the plough, gather up the white grubs in the furrows. A single hectare has been known to yield in this way from two hundred to three hundred kilograms of worms. The vermin are pressed down into the earth with lime, the whole making an excellent manure, and the enemy of harvests thus serves to accelerate their growth.”

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