Anthonomus grandis
(9 downloads)Saturday, Feb 23, 2008
One of many perennial Southern US preoccupations, the boll weevil, is celebrated here in this well known tune from Fats Domino, ‘Bo Weevil’. Like cotton, grits, and the county sheriff, this small but very destructive agricultural pest casts a long shadow across Dixie culture. The boll weevil is a quarter inch long beetle which nearly destroyed the US cotton industry in the 1920s. It is not native to the United States and is thought to have migrated here from Mexico, where it originally fed on undomesticated varieties of the cotton plant. It was first identified in North America in 1892. By the early 1920s the infestation was traveling at speeds of up to 160 miles per year.In a 1939 interview, Mose Austin recalled his employer stubbornly refusing to switch crops, planting cotton each year out of sheer defiance to the weevil onslaught:
“De cotton come up and started to growin', and, suh, befo' de middle of May I looks down one day and sees de boll weevil settin' up dere in de top of dem little cotton stalks waitin' for de squares to fo'm. So all dat gewano us hauled and put down in 1922 made nuttin' but a crop of boll weevils.”
The adult boll weevil enters a state of dormancy during the winter months. They begin to emerge from this hibernation in early spring. Mature females insert their eggs in the cotton bolls (the pods, hence the name) or squares. Over a ten to twelve day period, the female will lay approximately 200 eggs, one single egg to each individual pod. The eggs hatch in under a week’s time and the larvae then begin to feed on the host cotton boll. After 10 days at the larval stage the weevil arrives at its intermediary pupal stage, it is at this point that the insect removes itself from the host plant and becomes ambulatory. The pupal stage lasts about five days after which the weevils become adults, ready to mate and lay more eggs and continue to consume the cotton plants. The entire life cycle lasts about three weeks and under good conditions, a single summer can produce as many as ten generations of weevils.
Early, post WWII, measures at controlling the boll weevil included the use of such harmful pesticides as DDT. While pesticides are still commonly employed to control weevil populations, more recent measures include the introduction of predatory insects like fire ants and parasitic wasps.
The tune “Bo Weevil” hit number 35 on the pop chart and number 5 on the R&B in 1956. This isn’t by a long shot the only tune to light-heartedly commemorate this plague which ruined the lives of countless people from the Southwest to the mid-Atlantic. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the brunt of the losses was shouldered by the white landowning population. Songs about the boll weevil tended to reflect the perspective of poor white and black workers who saw little of the profits from ‘King Cotton’. They may have viewed this incredibly prolific nuisance as something of an equalizer in a semi-feudal society which persisted well into the 20th century. Mose Austin’s account seems to echo this sentiment.
Imperial 5375, 1957
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/dec11.html