Black-Beaked Green Weevil
Sam caught this tiny little green weevil on a windowsill on May 18, 2012.
Here’s the same picture uncropped, so you can see how tiny it was relative to my fingertip. It was only about 3 mm long, which is pretty small even for a weevil.
It has the distinct beak that one sees a lot in the various weevils in the family Curculionidae.
Based on the color and the size, this looks like a Black-Beaked Green Weevil, Hypera nigrirostris. This is supposed to be the smallest of the green weevils found in North America.
These are found in southeastern Canada and the northeastern US as far to the west as Minnesota, and apparently also in British Columbia. They are also common throughout Europe. This distribution pattern is strongly suggestive of a species that was imported from Europe, but if they were, it happened right away[1]. As in, maybe they were accidentally brought over by the very first European colonists, because they’ve been in North America ever since the first entomologists started noticing what was over here.
Their larvae eat legumes like red clover and birdsfoot trefoil, and they evidently aren’t enough of an agricultural pest for much specific study of them.
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[1] It’s not completely out of the question that they could have come over with Leif Ericson and his crew, although that would have required these weevils to have been established in Iceland and Greenland, too. Which they may be. They sound like the sort of thing that would get carried around in hay that was being used to feed horses and cattle while they were being carried to a new colony by ship. Then again, they might have crossed the Bering Land Bridge during one of the ice ages.
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