Word: bolling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
News about a machine to fight the dreaded boll weevil is spreading fast through the cotton country. The inventor is Alex R. Nisbet, 83, a spry, glittering-eyed, retired cotton planter who for the past few years has been tinkering around a machine shop in Plainview, Tex. The Department of Agriculture in Washington hao never heard of him, but farmers in his neighborhood have gathered that he proposes to blow the weevils off the cotton. Last week he was ready to talk...
...unusual eating habits also keep the termite safe from poisoned bait (used against ants, grasshoppers, etc.), contact poisons (used against orchard pests, etc.), poisoning of breeding grounds (used against mosquitoes), dusting (used against the boll weevil), introduction of natural enemies (used against the Japanese beetle and boll weevil) and other routine methods of fighting insects...
There is one offensive that never ends: man's battle against insects. It is a fight against the grasshoppers, the Mormon crickets, the boll weevils, the chinch bugs, the now doubly despised Japanese beetles and other pests that do two-billion-dollar damage every year in the U.S. alone; against flies, lice, roaches, mosquitoes and other infamous bugs that carry disease. Entomologists estimate that the U.S. harbors 7,000 species of insect pests. Said Entomologist Stephen Alfred Forbes of Illinois: "The struggle between man and insects began before the dawn of civilization . . . and will continue, no doubt, as long...
Smartest way for man to fight the insects who rival him for the earth's bounty is to turn insect against insect. The wasp Microbracon mellitor assassinates boll weevils (which last year destroyed 12-14% of the South's cotton), so this week an army of these stiletto-bearing flyers is being propagated at the University of Texas.* The Texas wasp dashes among cotton rows, seeks out bolls full of weevil larvae, plunges her stiletto into each grub, forces an egg through the hollow tube into each paralyzed victim, then flits on to another boll. In two days...
...from home, enlisted (under age) in the army. Later he was arrested on his father's orders, had his new uniform taken away. In 1926 he began to study engineering at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. In 1931 he took up flying, got a job plane-dusting boll weevils in the Delta. One night he crashed his plane and his job in Georgia. He came back to manage his brother's plantation near Oxford, where he "raised niggers and mules." John Faulkner admits he is still not much of a farmer, says "it would take...