How much do you know about weevils? “How much do I want to know?” I hear you cry. OK, fair point. But wait. What if I told you that the weevils you think of when you think of weevils weren’t weevils at all? And the weevils that are weevils gave us Muddy Waters, Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross?
Hah! Not so dismissive now.
The weevils you think of when you think of weevils are, of course, the ones that stowed away on Walter Raleigh’s ships and provided the nourishment in his biscuits. Also known as bread beetles or, due to their fondness for pharmaceuticals, drugstore beetles, these little critters are, as those alternative names suggest, beetles. Not weevils.
In fact, so often are they wrongly referred to as weevils that people who care actually refer to them as ‘non-weevils’. That’s a bit like referring to a human as a ‘non-horse’, although, to be fair, humans don’t generally get confused with horses – well, certain members of the Royal Family aside.
Better still, weevils that really are weevils are referred to as ‘true weevils’ – one of the great unmade film titles if ever there was one. Sequels include ‘Resident Weevil’ and ‘The Weevil Dead’.
One of the things that distinguish a weevil from a non-weevil is its long snout, which it uses for boring into plants, often with devastating effect. The boll weevil, for example, laid waste to the cotton crop throughout the American south in the early 20th century and thus triggered the Great Migration that gave us jazz, blues, Motown and every other cultural nugget that has come out of the Mississippi Delta, Chicago, Detroit etc, not to mention the peanut industry, which thrived in the Deep South as farmers were forced to diversify away from cotton, and Delta Airlines, which grew from a crop dusting operation specifically targeted at the boll weevil.
If you could have a conversation with a boll weevil, it would probably claim a hand in the Civil Rights movement too, and it would be hard to argue against it. Funny how something so small can have such a profound influence on the history of humankind. The boll weevil originally crossed over into Texas from Mexico. If only someone had thought to build a wall.
Now that you’re fascinated by boll weevils, you can read more about their role in American history in The 50 States of America (Arcturus Books)
