Cockchafer

“ An enormous grub of the cockchafer race, a great white worm, rolled himself over, trying to liberate himself and to crush the ants, whose number increased on every side, and who tore off his transparent, soft skin, and pulled him in every direction. ”

“ The cockchafer was charmed with the little maiden. He placed her tenderly on the largest leaf he could find. He gathered honey for her from the flowers, and as she sipped it, he sat near and told her how beautiful she looked.
But there were other chafers living in the tree, and when they came to see little Thumbelina, they said, “She is not pretty at all.” ”

“ At this season, every evening, in the gloaming, if the weather be still, the Cockchafer comes to visit the pine-trees in the enclosure. I follow his evolutions with my eyes. With a silent, impetuous flight, the males especially veer to and fro, displaying their great antennary plumes; they make for the branches where the females await them; they fly back and forth, visible as dark streaks against the pallor of the sky, from which the last remnants of daylight are fading. They settle, take flight again and resume their busy rounds. ”

“ The cockchafer-grub lies in the ground for four years before it turns into a real cockchafer, and all this time it keeps growing larger and larger; and, of course, the larger it grows, the more it eats and the more harm it does. ”

“ The cockchafer is common everywhere in spring, and if you shake a young birch-tree, or a hazel-bush, three or four of the great clumsy insects will very likely come tumbling down. They are rather more than an inch long, very stoutly and heavily [357] built, and are chestnut brown in color, while their bodies are drawn out into a kind of point behind. The grubs of these beetles live underground, and do a great deal of mischief in fields and gardens, for they feed upon the roots of the plants, and very soon kill them. ”

“ I will exercise your tiny butterfly-wings very carefully just at present. We have only to examine what becomes of the chyle of the cockchafer after it has been prepared in the pretty little tube so finely wrought. We men have chyliferous vessels which draw up chyle from the intestines and throw it within a short distance of the heart, into the torrent of blood, where its education is completed. But the cockchafer, who has no other vessels than his air-pipes, and the dorsal tube, which has no communication with the intestines, what is he to do? ”

“ The honey is not produced in the flowers, and seems at first sight to be of no use at all so far as the plant is concerned, but that is very far from being the case. Here comes a cockchafer or other destructive beetle, intent on absolutely devouring and destroying the young flowers. At once the pugnacity and wrath of the ants are aroused. They take up a menacing and ferocious attitude, and the cockchafer passes to some other plant. ”

“ These of the cockchafer are destroyed by them in thousands; and it is remarkable that the nostrils, chin, and sides of the mouth, in old rooks, are white, and bared of feathers, in consequence, as it is supposed, of their frequent habit of thrusting their bill into the ground in search of these insects. ”

“ Cockchafer- and Anoxia-grubs, are hoarders of fæcal matter: they reserve in their brown paunches the wherewithal to build themselves a lodging when the time comes.
I collect my fat grubs in a sandy soil, where lean grass-tufts grow, at a great distance from any resinous tree except the cypress, which the adult insect does not visit. The Cockchafer, therefore, after her regulation frolics on the pines, came to this place from afar to lay her eggs. She feeds frugally on pine-needles; her larva calls for the remnants of any leaves softened by underground putrefaction. ”

“ They fear the heat of the day and the bright sunshine, so, during the day, they remain hooked on to the under surface of leaves. It is only early in the morning, and at sunset, that one sees the cockchafers fluttering round the trees which they frequent. They fly with rapidity, pro 447 ducing a monotonous sound by the friction of their wings. But the cockchafer steers badly when it flies; it knocks itself at each instant against obstacles it meets with. ”

“ Animals do not contribute much towards limiting the number of cockchafers, although the latter are not wanting in natural enemies. Among insects, it is the large species of Carabus which search after the larvæ as well as the adult cockchafers. The Carabus auratus attacks them with great coolness. M. Blanchard saw a carabus seize a cockchafer in the middle of the road, open its belly with its mandibles, and devour its intestines. ”

“ In the north, where she abounds, the Green Grasshopper would not find the dish which attracts her so strongly here. She must have other resources. To convince myself of this, I give her Anoxiæ (A. pilosa, Fab.) , the summer equivalent of the spring Cockchafer. The Beetle is accepted without hesitation. Nothing is left of him but the wing-cases, head and legs. The result is the same with the magnificent plump Pine Cockchafer (Melolontha fullo, Lin.) , a sumptuous morsel which I find next day eviscerated by my gang of knackers. ”

“ Fig. 432.—Cockchafer (Melolontha vulgaris) .
During the day the cockchafers remain under the leaves in a state of perfect immobility; for the heat which gives activity to other insects, seems, on the contrary, to stupefy them, and it is during the night only that they devour the leaves of elms, poplars, oaks, beech, birch-trees, &c. In years when their number is not very great, one hardly perceives the damage done by them ”

“ I am the more inclined to be of this opinion, because we have many Rooks in this neighbourhood where the cockchafer is not known as a destructive insect, and I know that insects of that class and their larvae are the most favourite food of the Rook, which may be seen in the twilight catching both cockchafers and the large blackbeetles which are flying at that time in the evening. ”

“ Coleoptera are given to cavalage, of duration varying from ten hours to two days. The male cockchafer pursues the female with fervour, he is so ardent that he often mounts other males, deceived by the odour of rut floating in the air. He seizes the female and holds her clamped by his forelegs and genital hooks. ”

“ It falls in every instance towards us, but it falls with exactly the same swiftness as that with which it seeks to get away from us. Consequently it remains always at the same distance. The attraction which prevents the moon from running away may be likened to a string tied to the claws of a cockchafer. The cockchafer flies, seeking to free itself; the string pulls it back towards the child's finger; and very often the circular flight which the insect takes around the finger which holds it represents exactly the circular flight of the moon around the earth. ”

“ Another disproof may be found in the ‘fern web,’ ‘bracken clock’ of Scotland; the tiny cockchafer, with brown wing-cases and dark-green thorax, which abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the fern, or on the heads of umbelliferous flowers. ”

“ Among the vegetable-feeding chafers we usually find that while the perfect insect devours leaves, the larva lives underground and feeds on roots. Such are the habits of the cockchafer (Melolontha vulgaris) and other species that often cause great injury to farm and 674 garden crops (see Chafer) . Many of these insects, such as the species of Phanaeus (fig. 29) and Cetonia (fig. 30) , are adorned with metallic or other brilliant colours. The African “goliath-beetles” (fig. 31) and the American “elephant-beetles” (Dynastes) are the largest of all insects. ”

“ The ingenuity of man may thus even procure good out of a very formidable evil, although the mischief done by the cockchafer larva undoubtedly far exceeds the benefit it confers upon its captors in the amount of oil extracted from it.
An insect almost equally familiar to all persons is the long-legged gnat, of whom the famous children's rhyme runs:—
Many of our farmers would be glad, no doubt, if taking him by the left leg would keep him out of their meadows, for there this insect commits fearful ravages in the larva form. ”

“ To get at the exact nature of the materials, instead of pulverizing the whole insect in a mortar, I use merely the muscular tissue obtained by scraping the inside of the dried Oryctes' corselet. Or else I extract the dry contents of the hind legs. I do the same with the desiccated corpses of the cockchafer, the Capricorn, or Cerambyx beetle, and the Cetonia, or rosechafer. Each of my gleanings, with a little water added, is left to soften for a couple of days in a watch glass and yields to the liquid whatever can be extracted from it by crushing and dissolving. ”

“ When watching these birds at their work it struck me that the enormous increase of starlings all over the country in recent years may account for the fact that great cockchafer years do not now occur. ”

“ A general cockchafer hunt, rendered obligatory by a law, and encouraged by prizes, would be the only efficacious means of opposing a pest which costs agriculture many millions. This means would also be less costly than the turning up of the land concealing the larvæ, when it is remembered that they prefer land in full bearing. ”

“ I have understood that in Suffolk and in some of the southern counties, the larvae of the cockchafer are so exceedingly abundant that the crops of corn are almost destroyed by them, and that their ravages do not cease even when they have become perfect insects. ”

“ The unexplained phenomenon persists consistently throughout the whole domain of entomology and ornithology. Going up the scale from the gnat, it is found that with the dragon fly this ratio is 30 to 1, with the tipula, or daddy-longlegs, 14.5 to 1, the cockchafer only 5.15 to 1, the rhinoceros beetle 3.14 to 1.
"Among birds the paradoxical law that the smaller the creature the bigger the relative supporting wings holds good. ”

“ Whatever may be the true explanation of stridulating organs in adult beetles, sexual selection can have had nothing to do with the presence of these highly-developed larval structures. It has been suggested that the power of stridulation would be advantageous to wood-boring grubs, the sound warning each of the position of its neighbour, so that adjacent burrowers may not get in each other’s way. The root-feeding larvae of the cockchafer and allied members of the Scarabaeidae have a ridged area on the mandible, which is scraped by teeth on the maxillae, apparently forming a stridulating organ. ”

“ Butterflies and Dragon-flies, Flies and Wasps, small Dung-beetles and Locusts. If I offer her a Mantis, a Bumble-bee, an Anoxia—the equivalent of the common Cockchafer—and other dishes probably unknown to her race, she accepts all and any, large and small, thin-skinned and horny-skinned, that which goes afoot and that which takes winged flight. She is omnivorous, she preys on everything, down to her own kind, should the occasion offer. ”

“ As soon as it arrives, the swarms of cockchafers become its nightly prey, and when their season is ended, the fern-chafer affords it a plentiful fare. Moths also, and other night-flying insects, are pursued by it, particularly around the summits of trees, and are readily engulfed in its cavernous mouth, surrounded by divergent bristles. It has been supposed, at least sometimes, to take its flying prey with its little foot, and deliver it to its mouth ”

“ Some years cockchafers are so abundant as to be quite a pest, though, perhaps, the next season they are rarely to be met with. Entomologists have been puzzled to account for these changes; but with regard to the butterflies, their abundance or scarcity is said to depend chiefly on the number of ichneumons.”
“Ichneumons!” cried Agnes, “I thought they were only found in Egypt.”
“I do not mean the animal that destroys the eggs of the Crocodile on the banks of the Nile,” said Mr. Merton, “but a kind of fly which lays its eggs in the living bodies of caterpillars.” ”

“ For the most part, however, the food of this species consists of cockchafers and their destructive larvæ or slugs; whilst in pursuit of these, their acute sense of smell would seem to guide them to the exact spot under which they lie concealed, and so enormous are the numbers they dig up, that, as we have said, the hungry Rooks actually rub the feathers from their faces by constantly burrowing in the ground with their beaks. In the breeding season, numerous pairs build close together, quarrelling the whole time, and robbing each other incessantly of the materials collected. ”

“ The sorts, which feed on insects when wild, should have some of these preserved for them through the winter, except where they can be procured at all seasons. At a baker’s shop, for instance, there are always plenty of meal-worms, crickets, and cockroaches, of which most of these birds are very fond: when those are not to be procured, a good substitute is the large white grubs that produce the cockchafers, which in some years are very plentiful, and may be kept in pots of turfy earth through the winter, as may also the maggots of the bluebottle fly, if procured late in the autumn ”

“ A prince in Bohemia once employed two hundred men for four days and a half in collecting caterpillars during a plague of these, and they gathered twenty-three bushels of them, which they reckoned amounted to 4,500,000 of these creatures. In the year 1574 cockchafers gathered in such numbers on the banks of the Severn that the water-mills were stopped working. ”