The weevil has a small body and a tentacle on its head, accounting for about half of the body, and seeing this insect will remind people of the long nose of an elephant, so people call it a weevil. But don't think of the long tentacles as the nose of the weevil, at the end of the tentacles is not the nose, but the mouthparts they use to chew food.
Weevils are the largest family of Coleoptera insects and the most diverse species in the insect kingdom, with more than 60,000 known species in the world and more than 6,000 species in China. Compared with females, males and females have bare eyes, shorter noses, larger bodies, and villi on the edges of the elytra, making it easy to distinguish male and female individuals in the wild.
Weevils feed only on male pollen, while larvae feed on decaying flowers and gradually become adults. Before laying eggs, females of weevils often drill a tubular burrow or transverse crack in the plant tissue with the mouthparts of the snout, and then lay the eggs in the tissue, and some species can reproduce in the form of parthenogenesis. They only live for three weeks, but adults only need to live for a few weeks to continuously produce 4 or more offspring.
For economic plants, weevils are pests, such as cotton weevils that harm cotton, white pine weevils that harm coniferous trees, grain weevils that harm grains, banana pseudostem weevils and weevils that harm bananas, and weevils that harm sugarcane. However, these beetles do not bite people, adults also have the habit of suspended animation, and some large species have even become human pets.
Although most of the weevils are pests, individual species are beneficial to humans, such as the mother grass straight beaked elephant, this worm lays eggs in the ovary of the mother grass or water bitter wattle, with the development of the larvae, the ovary develops into a gall; before the adult insect feathers, harvest the whole grass, dried into medicine, called peach grass, can be used to stop bleeding, activate blood, reduce swelling, relieve pain, etc.
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