The first book of bugs

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THE FIRST BOOK OF

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A special thank you to Dr. N. J. Berrill, Ph. D. Sc.,
F,R,S,C, Strathcona Professor of Zoology at McGill
University in Montreal, not only because he carefully
checked this book for its scientific accuracy, but also
because he first introduced the author-artist to the ad-
venture in a bug's world.

Thank you also to Mr. George Moore, custodian of the
Lyman Entomological Collection at McGill University,
and to Mrs. E. E. Terrill, Librarian of the Blackader
Library of Zoology at McGill University, for their as-
sistance. M. W.

Copyright 1949 by Franklin Wattj, Inc.
Printed in the U.S.A. by W. S. Konecky Associates

THE

FIRST

BOOK

WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED BY

MARGARET WILLIAMSON

GREYSTONE PRESS

NEW YORK

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Not all the tiny creatures you see
creeping and crawling and flying
are truly bugs. When somebody says,
"Ooh, look at the bug ! " he might be
pointing at a beetle with six legs, or a
spider with eight legs, or a centipede
with many legs. Or he might be

pointing at a stink bug, which belongs to the only family
scientists call bugs. But in this book, let's call them all bugs
to make it easier, and, often where a bug is magnified, the out-
line beside it shows you about how big it really is.

If you watch a bug as it goes along about its business, you
can find out what a bug's world is like. You can see what
kind of legs and wings and feelers it has arid how they work,
and you can hear the noises it makes.

If you wait and watch long enough, you may even see it
creep out of the hard, stiff suit of armor that all bugs wear,
and walk off in the new and bigger suit that has been grow-
ing, all wrinkled, underneath the old one.

If you wait still longer, you might see how a bug's young
are born and how they grow up. Perhaps you may even find
out who its enemies are.

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Bugs are so small that it is hard to
imagine they can be strong enough
to fight their enemies. But some of
them can run or jump quickly, while
others can fly away.

A bug may have a sting, to sting
its enemies, or strong jaws to bite
them. Some bugs can run or jump quickly, while others can
fly away. Even so, lots of bugs are killed. But there are always
more. There are more bugs in the world than all the people
and animals you can think of. That's mostly because bugs are
born by the thousands — much faster than their enemies can
eat them up.

Bugs do not think about things or make plans as people
do. They are born knowing everything they need to know
about getting food, and fighting their enemies, and building
their houses.

Even a young spider builds its first web perfectly, although
it may never have seen another spider web. Its mother does
not ever need to show it how.

Not even scientists have figured out exactly how a bug
knows these things. That is still a bug's secret.

Sometimes people get angry at bugs. Clothes mothS chew
up their swimming suits and mittens, cockroaches crawl over
dishes in the sink, potato bugs eat holes in potato vines,
Japanese beetles ruin the prettiest roses and ter-
mites chew wooden stairs in houses.

But bugs are valuable, too. After all, the honey
for your waffles comes from bees, and silk for
your dresses from silkworms, and the shellac that
makes your furniture shine comes from scale
bugs.

Even those same termites who ^ ^
tunnel through wooden stairs in our
houses, eat old dead wood in other
places where it is not wanted and
make it part of the earth again. In \
that way, they save people the trouble
of burning or burying lots of rub-
bish, and they make room for new
animals and plants as well.
No bug really intends to be harmful or useful.
It just lives its own life. Now you're going to see
how some bugs live, what they eat, where they
sleep, how long they live, and how they have fun.

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Best of all, a cricket likes to sit in the sun and
make music. If he's frightened, he'll stop play-
ing, and jump like a jumping jack.

A cricket has a fiddle and a bow hidden in his
two top wings. The top of each wing has ridges
on it and the bottom of each wing has a row of
small teeth like a file. To make his music, he
crosses his wings one over the other and saws
them back and forth.

A cricket can fool you. When he plays loudly,
he sounds as if he were right beside you. But he
can play very softly to make himself sound far
away.

In the springtime, Mr. Cricket plays a love
song to a lady cricket, who listens carefully with
her knees. That's where crickets' ears are. She can't play
music because she has no fiddle in her wings. Besides, after a
while she is busy laying dozens of eggs in holes which she
digs in the earth with her sharp pointed shovel. Later, she
dies, but the young crickets can get along perfectly well from
the minute they are born, even while they are in the egg.

9

The sun bakes the earth that covers the eggs and keeps
them warm. When the young crickets have grown too big
for the eggs, they push with their heads till the lids on their
eggs fly open, and out they pop. They look just like grown-up
crickets, but they are much smaller, and have no wings. They
are curious, and push their way out of the earth to go adven-
turing. If they are lucky, and are not gobbled up by an ant
or a lizard, crickets wander all summer long, hiding under
leaves and stones, and usually waiting until night to hunt
for food.

A cricket eats so much that soon its hard black suit, which
cannot grow at all, splits open down the back and it creeps
out in its new and bigger suit. Before the summer is over
and a cricket is full-sized, it grows out of four or five suits.

In the fall, it digs itself a house in the earth. It digs and

scrapes and sweeps and rakes with its
legs, and lifts pebbles out of the way
with its strong jaws. It hollows out a

tunnel just big enough to crawl through and a
room at the end where it can just turn around.

A cricket's house is not where young grow up,
like the bee's hive, and it is not a trap for bugs
like the spider's web. A cricket's house is just for

itself-a place where it can be safe and warm and snug, and it

will fight fiercely if other bugs walk in by mistake.

To find a field cricket's house, try the edge of a field where

the grass is not so tall. Look closely, because the front door is

just a tuft of grass. If the cricket is not outside, you can bring

it out by poking a straw down the tunnel.
Some crickets do not dig houses.

Instead, when it gets cold they hop

into people's homes and live in a

crack where it is warm. In China, a

friendly house cricket is often kept

in a cage as a musical pet. Boys and

girls carry the cages on strings

around their necks and feed the

crickets melon and lettuce from tiny dishes, or a spoonful of

mosquitoes as medicine if their feelers droop.

Crickets have relatives who play music, too, on hot summer

days and nights. The katydid plays a song which sounds like

II

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"Katy did, Katy didn't," by rub-
bing his wings together, much as
crickets do.

A grasshopper makes his music by
rubbing the files on his back legs
across the ridges on his top wings,
and he listens with the ears in his
sides. When grasshoppers fly, they
make a crackling noise by rattling
all four wings.

Some of the crickets' relatives
aren't so much fun to have around.
Cockroaches come into houses, crawl over food, and nibble
everything in sight. The female cockroach carries around a
bag with sixteen eggs inside. When she finds a warm crack
to put them in, she leaves them there to hatch.

Grasshopper locusts travel in swarms as big as storm clouds
in the sky. Wherever they land they eat every green, grow-
ing thing in sight. That's why farmers are so afraid of them.

The cicada, who is sometimes called a locust too, is another
bug musician, but he doesn't belong to the cricket or grass-
hopper family. He makes his whirring noise by squeezing
the muscles in and out on two drums on his stomach, just as

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you can make a noise by pushing in and out on ^.^..^

the bulging bottom of a pan.

As a young cicada, in a white suit, it may hve
for as long as seventeen years, tunneling through
the earth, eating roots. Then it comes up to the
air, climbs a tree, splits its skin, and walks out, a grown-up
cicada with wings. No other six-legged creature takes so long
to grow up.

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Some bugs eat their old skins, but the cicada leaves its skin *|^,
behind on the bark of a tree where you can find it quite easily,
if you look.

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Everywhere you go there are beetles - flying through the
air, walking in the grass, or swimming in the water. They all
have mouths with many parts to help them bite and chew
their food and build their houses and fight their enemies.
They all have coats of armor for protection, and their young
all grow up in the same way.

Here is a ladybug beetle. Its orange coat of armor, like all
beetle armor, is hiade of two wings which fit
tightly over its back. These wings are very hard
and they protect the two soft brown flying wings
underneath. When a ladybug flies, it raises its
hard wing-covers high, so that they won't be in
the way.

Here is a female tiger beetle. She lays an egg
in a pit she digs in the earth. When the egg
hatches, out creeps a doodlebug, which looks like a worm
with hooks on its back. These help it climb up and down like
an elevator inside its pit. A doodlebug's head is as round and
as flat as a plate and fits up into the top of its tunnel like a
trapdoor. From the outside, it looks like part of the ground.

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If a tiny creature does not watch where it is going, it might
walk right over the doodlebug's face - and get caught in
the strong jaws. Then the doodlebug takes it to the bottom
of the tunnel to eat it.

For two years the doodlebug lives in its burrow, eating in
the summer and sleeping in the winter, and changing its

skins as it grows bigger and bigger. Then one day, it closes
its door with earth and goes to the bottom of its tunnel and
digs a bedroom ofif to the side. There it changes into quite
a different skin from all the others it has worn. This one is
called a pupa skin. As a pupa, it sleeps, all the time growing
less and less like a doodlebug, and more and more like a
grown-up beetle. Then one day the pupa skin splits open
and a tiger beetle crawls out.

15 .

All beetles grow up like tiger beetles. A beetle is born as
an egg. But it doesn't hatch first into a little beetle. Instead,
a worm-like creature, usually called a larva, hatches from the
egg and lives to eat and grow bigger and change its skin.
When a larva changes its skin for the last time, it becomes a
pupa and goes to sleep. When the pupa skin splits open, a
grown-up beetle with wings and feelers and legs creeps out.
How all this happens, no one exactly knows. That is another
bug secret.

Though all beetles grow up in the
same way and have a protecting ar-
mor and a mouth for biting and
chewing, each kind of bccde has
something that makes it different

from all the others.

A firefly is a beetle with a light
on its tail. The firefly makes two
chemicals inside itself which, when
they are squirted out together, glow
brightly without heat. At mating
time, the female's light shines extra
brightly. Since only the male can fly,
she climbs to the top of a bush.
There she twists about all night long

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and flashes her hght to attract the male fireflies
who flit about her.

Here are diving beetles. They can swim, and
have things which are special to swimming
beetles. Their long legs are like hairy paddles,
and their bodies are streamlined to help them
slip through the water. Diving beetles can't
breathe under water, where they collect their
food, so they store bubbles of air underneath
their hard wing covers. They breathe this air

through small holes along the edge

of their backs.
A tumblebug beetle, also called a

dung beetle, is a sculptor who makes

balls of manure, which is its food. Its

flat, sharp-edged head is its shovel

for digging and cutting. Its front

legs have teeth to use as a rake and

broom, and its four back legs are

curved, to shape and pat the manure

into a ball. When the ball is round

and just right, the tumblebug rolls

it along to a place where it can eat

quietly all by itself. The bug bur-
rows into the ground, builds a

dining room, rolls its food ball in-

17

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side, and closes the door with earth.
When this ball is eaten, the bug
starts all over again.

Sometimes a tumblebug has an accident; the ball rolls
away and the bug tumbles on its back. Other times a lazy
tumblebug tries to steal another bug's ball and there is a fight.
If the lazy robber doesn't want to fight, it may pretend to
help, by pulling the ball, or it may climb up on top and get
a free ride. Then it waits for a chance to steal the ball.

In the autumn, the mother tumblebug digs a burrow and
builds a very special pear-shaped ball. One end is a cradle for
an egg. The other end is the food for the larva that will

hatch from her egg.

While the larva grows bigger and bigger, the
food in the storehouse grows smaller and smaller,
till at last the larva fills the whole pear-shaped
shell. Inside this shell it turns first into a pupa,
then into a full-grown tumblebug, and then it
pushes its way out into the world.

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There are many more beetles, and
each one has something which is
quite special to itself.

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FLIES

The fly we know best is the housefly. There are many other
kinds, too. FHes are called flies because they can fly farther and
better and faster than almost all other bugs with wings. A
true fly has two wings, and it zooms in a straight line. Each
wing has a stiff strong front edge, but the main part of the
wing is thinner than cellophane. As its wings move up and
down, the air pushes against the thin part and makes it bulge
like a sail in the wind. The bigger the bulge, and the oftener
the fly's wings move up and down, the faster it goes. To turn
left, it slows down the beating of its left wing. Sometimes it
uses its hind legs as a rudder.

The housefly has sticky pads on its feet which help it to
walk upside down on ceilings. It has huge eyes because it
flies so quickly it needs to see well to keep from bumping into
things. Flies may seem to be very
clean because they so often dust their
wings and brush their legs, but really
they are just about the dirtiest bugs
alive.

Houscflics live in, and lay their eggs on garbage and dirt
and things that are full of germs which cling to their sticky
feet. Then they come into our houses and wipe their dirty
feet all over our food, leaving germs behind. That is the way
flies spread sickness.

Mosquitoes belong to the fly family. In the summertime

they whine about our heads, bite us, and keep us awake at

night. Their humming, like the humming of all flies, is the

sound of their beating wings. The male mosquito lives on

fruit juices. It is the female that bites us and sucks our blood.

Inside her long sucking tube, she

has sliding needles sharp enough to

bore through our skin .To make our

blood thinner and easier to suck, she

mixes some of her saliva with it. In

the saliva there is a poison which

makes bites itch and swell into bumps.

The mosquito lays her eggs on

stagnant water. They are all glued together and float like a

raft. These eggs, like all other flies' eggs, hatch into larvae

called wrigglers. The wrigglers grow into pupae and finally

the pupae become grown-up mosquitoes.

21

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In countries where the cHmate is very hot, there
are mosquitoes that carry about the germs of
dreadful diseases. First, the mosquitoes suck up
the germs that are in the sick person's blood.
Then when they bite someone else for a meal,
they leave those germs behind. To get rid of mos-
quitoes people pour oil on the ponds where they
lay their eggs. The hatching mosquitoes can't
breathe air through the oil, and they die.

Besides flies that bother us and
spread disease, there are flies, called
ya, botflies, whose young live in a
horse's stomach or under a cow's
skin and hurt them.

A bee fly's children live as unwel-
come guests in bees' hives, and eat
up the young bees.

The horsefly chases horses and
cows. It bites them and makes them
switch their tails and stamp their
feet.

22

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A deer fly can give people rabbit fever.

A gnat, often called a black fly, bites campers
and fishermen in early summer.

A bright blue fly, called a bluebottle, zooms
and buzzes about in the summer, too.

The robber fly is the biggest and fiercest of all.
It is not afraid of w^asps or bees, and swoops
dow^n to catch them in mid-air.

A flea is a fly's cousin. Fleas live in dogs' or
cats' hair and suck their blood.

A midge, or sand fly, bites you at the beach.

Flies are just about the most bothersome bugs
in the world.

about

The most interesting thing about spiders is that they all
spin silk and use it in different ways. Some spiders weave
silk rope into webs. Others make silk hinges for the trap
doors of their houses. Some spider mothers make soft silk
blankets for their young, and most young spiders spin silk
balloons with which to go riding on the breeze.

Near the end of a spider's body there are four or more
spinning fingers, called spinnerets. Each spin-
neret has hundreds of tiny holes. Spiders make
a liquid inside their bodies, which flows out
through the holes and hardens into
silk thread in the air. When a
spider wants a wide ribbon of silk
it spreads its spinnerets far apart
and when it wants a thin thread it
pulls them close together. A spider
sometimes uses the combs which are
on its back legs to help it pull wide
threads together to make solid sheets
of silk.

Female spiders are much bigger

3 up

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24

than male spiders. They build the webs, catch the food,
and look after the young spiders. But all spiders are very
helpful to people, because they feed on bugs that eat up
vegetables or trees.

Spiders weave their webs of their sticky silk to catch the
juicy grasshoppers and flies and moths they like to eat. A
garden spider weaves her web close to the ground where
other bugs fly. She weaves it in exactly the same way other
garden spiders do, and her first web is just as well made as
her tenth. When the web is finished, some spiders make a
zig-zag line that looks as if they were signing their names.
Though some spiders can repair broken webs, most of them

have to start new ones all over again,
because they can't pick up an unfin-
ished job part- way through.

Spiders do not get caught in their
own webs, because their legs are cov-
ered with slippery oil which they
make inside their bodies. When a
bug gets caught in the snare, the
spider shakes the web with all her
might to tangle him even more. She
rushes to him and throws blankets
of her silk over him, till he can't

25

even wiggle. Then she bites him

with her poison fangs and sucks out

his blood.

Spider poison is strong enough to

kill small animals, but only one kind
of spider has poison strong enough
to hurt people badly. This one is the
Black Widow spider, and you can
recognize her by the red hour-glass
shape on the underside of her body.
A trap-door spider digs a burrow
in the ground and makes a silk-and-
mud door to cover it. This door
opens and shuts on a silk hinge. She
covers the top of the door with earth
and leaves and moss, so that from
the outside it can hardly be seen.
Then she locks the door on the in-
side by holding it with her sharp
claws. This makes her house safe
from enemies. Not even water can
find a way in. When a juicy bug
walks outside, she swings the door
back on its hinge, springs out and

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pounces on him. When she goes for a long walk she trails a
line of silk from her burrow, which she follows to find her
way back home again.

Most spiders weave satin blankets and soft fluffy quilts for
their young. The garden spider weaves a fine satin sac, lays
hundreds of eggs in it and wraps the bundle up in clouds of
soft silk which she puffs up with the combs on her back legs.
Then she hangs her sac to twigs with silk ropes, and the eggs
are kept warm in it all winter long.

The tarantula spider also makes a silk sac for her eggs but
she carries hers along wherever she goes. Each day she sits
in the sun and turns the egg sac round and round to be
warmed. When the eggs hatch after a few weeks, the young
spiders crawl out onto her back. If
they fall off, they use her legs as lad-
ders to climb back.

In the fall, young spiders climb

27 '

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up the tallest grass and shoot out long filmy
threads of silk. Some of the threads catch on
flowers or bushes and become bridges. The
young spiders walk tightrope across the bridges
to still higher places, where they send out more
threads. The wind tugs at the threads until the
spiderlings are lifted high into the air. They fly ^

over towns and fields, and even across the sea to
islands hundreds of miles away. Wherever they
land, that's where they grow up.

Balloon-makers, rope-makers, hinge-makers
and weavers-spiders, all of them, and all of them
spinning their silk.

(afVer H c KAeCook)j

about

Ants do not live by themselves, as crickets and
beetles and most other bugs do. Hundreds and
hundreds of them live together in big ant cities
and divide up the w^ork to be done. Most of their
cities are made of passageways all joined together
and winding far under the earth.

There are three kinds of ants in every ant city -
the egg-laying females, the males,
and a special group called the work-
ers. The workers are females, but
they do not lay eggs. They do all the
other work in the city. Each kind of
ant is born knowing what his life work is, just as
it is born with six legs and a pair of feelers. Ants
don't have to be taught how to do their work, any
more than a young spider has to be taught how
to build a web.

Workers don't have wings, but the males and
females do, and they fly together when they
mate. This is called swarming. What most people

29

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think are a separate breed of "flying ants" are really only the
males and females at mating time.

When swarming is over, the male drops to the ground and
dies, for his work is done. The female ant then begins her
^ork. She rubs her wings off because she will never need

* .1 . ^"

them again. Then she makes a nest in the earth and lays some
eggs. This is the beginning of a new city.

When the eggs hatch, she washes the larvae with her
tongue and feeds them the food stored in her stomach and
^guards them from harm. These first young ants are always
.tiny workers, who grow up in a few weeks and begin keeping

^

house so that the mother ant need do nothing but lay milUons
of eggs all the rest of her life. Later, she lays eggs which will
grow into males and females as well as workers. It is a mystery
even to scientists why her eggs grow into different kinds of
ants at different times.

Ants grow up like beetles. They are first eggs, then larvae,
then pupae. But young ants can't look after themselves like
young beetles. Some of the workers are nurse-
maids for the young ants. They have to feed
them, take them out in the sun for airings, keep*
them clean and help them change their skins
when they grow too big and burst them.

Other workers spend all their lives cleaning
the city and adding new parts to it. Some of the
workers are bigger than the others. They act like
soldiers and policemen, and guard the passages
day and night. If danger comes, they run through
the city, warning the other ants by tapping their feelers.
When they fight, they shoot streams of stinging liquid at
their enemies and bite them with their sharp jaws.

Some of the worker ants go out to collect food. Ants like
many kinds of food, but their favorite meal is a liquid called
honeydew, which they get by milking plant lice. The plant
lice make this liquid inside themselves when they suck the

Konat^davti "cow'

juices from trees, just as cows make
milk from eating grass. An ant finds
a honeydew "cow" and strokes her
gently with its feelers. The sweet
honeydew comes out of two little
tubes at the tip of her body, and the
ant sucks it out. It milks one cow
after another, till it can't drink an-
other drop. Then it goes back to the city to deliver the honey-
dew milk to all the other ants. A hungry ant taps the feelers
of an ant with food. They touch tongues and honeydew
flows from the full ant to the hungry ant.

Besides working hard, ants keep
themselves very clean. Ants' bodies
are covered with hair so fine it is
hard to see. They use their tongues as
sponges and their legs with bristles
and hooks as combs. Often, before
they go to sleep, or after eating, they
brush and comb and wash themselves and each other until
there isn't a speck of dirt left on them.

Though ants may act like nursemaids or policemen or
milkmen they aren't really a bit like people, because they
can't think about what they do, or plan their work.

32

Sometimes that's hard to beUevc, when you hear the stories
that are told about ants.

For example-once upon a time, in Italy, some red ants
found their way into a house over a window sill. The lady of
the house didn't want them getting into her sugar, so she put
some flypaper on the sill to stop them. Soon hundreds of ants
were caught.

The next morning, the lady couldn't believe her eyes when
she saw a line of ants crossing over the paper and coming into
the house again. She looked closer, and discovered that during
the night the ants had built a road by dropping bits of earth on
the paper. They had not let her stop them !

Scientists have not yet been able to
explain just exactly how ants can do
such amazing things. There is still
so much to learn about a bug's world.

h^<p^

PHid^kb (Mvl BiAjtten^UeA

All moths and butterflies have four velvety flying wings.
Though they fly slowly, and zig-zag back and forth, they can
fly for long distances without getting tired. Some butterflies
often fly hundreds of miles south, to escape the winter.

Here's how you can tell moths and butterflies apart. Moths
fly at night and usually have feelers that are feathery. Butter-

«99s

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flies fly in the daytime and have feel-
ers that have knobs on them.

Each family of moths and each
family of butterflies is dressed in its
own colors and patterns, and lays

hundreds of eggs of its own special shape on its own special
kind of leaf or twig. The eggs hatch in about a week and a
different kind of caterpillar comes out of each kind of egg.

Some caterpillars are as wooly as bears. Some have horns.
Some have bristles which sting. Some can wave their heads
in the air. One caterpillar has a false-face. It can blow up the
front of its body to look like a green snake with yellow eyes.

34

All caterpillars can spin a silk thread with the spinneret
beneath their mouths. Tent caterpillars and pine caterpillars
both live in groups, in silk tents they weave for themselves.
When pine caterpillars go exploring, they play follow the
leader. Each one leaves a silk thread behind, making a ribbon
which they all follow home again.

Henri Fabre, a French scientist who has written wonder-
ful stories about his insect friends, once tried an experiment
with some pine caterpillars. He joined their silk ribbon end
to end in a circle, and they marched around it for eight days,
hardly ever stopping. On the eighth day, one caterpillar fell
out of line by accident, and found its way home. Then slowly
the others followed.

Bugs are born knowing how to do many clever xhings,
but when tricks are played on them they don't know how to
figure things out for themselves as people do.

A caterpillar spends all its days just eating. Like the

beetle larva, it may grow out of five
bigger and bigger skins. The last
time it changes its skin, it puts on its
new and different pupa skin and
goes to sleep.

Most kinds of moth caterpillars
change into their pupa skins in a

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warm little dressing room they make, called a
cocoon. Cocoons may be of silk thread, or of
leaves sewn together with silk thread or of earth.
People unwind the thread from the cocoon of the
silk moth to make silk dresses.

When a butterfly caterpillar becomes a pupa,
it doesn't make a cocoon. Instead, it spins a silk
net on a twig to give it something to hold on to,
and a silk rope to tie itself about the middle. Then
it wiggles out of its old caterpillar skin, which
has split down the back. The pupa skin under-
neath is wet and sticky, but when it dries, it is
hard and as waterproof as a raincoat. Each kind
of butterfly has its own kind of pupa skin.

When the pupa skin splits, the moth or butter-
fly climbs out. First it dries its wet and wrinkled
wings, and then pumps them full of the greenish
fluid which is a bug's blood. Then it drinks some
flower nectar with its long sucking tongue which
works like a nosedropper and can be curled up
when it is not being used. After coming out of its
pupa skin, it lives only a few more weeks.

a buW-erfly ca+erpillar
cKon9e.s in+o \-t-s pupo sK\n

During that short time, moths and butterflies do not grow
any more. They spend their time fluttering from flower to
flower, sipping the sweet juices and hving a carefree hfe.

After the females have mated, they lay their eggs wherever
the caterpillars that will hatch from the eggs can find the food
they like best to eat.

Grown-up moths and butterflies are quite harmless. It is
while they are in their caterpillar stages that they do damage.
The moth caterpillars are the worst pests. They are the ones
that tunnel through fruit, and stalks of grain, and eat holes
in our best woolen sweaters.

Moths and butterflies have many enemies. Birds think
them a juicy mouthful and find their colors easy to follow in
a chase. But they each have a way to fool their enemies at such
times. A butterfly's brightest colors are on the top of its wings.
When a butterfly alights, it folds its wings above its back and,
presto, the bright colors are hidden. Only the dull undersides
of the wings show, and they match the surroundings. When a
moth rests, it folds its front wings over the more brightly
colored rear ones. In that way, it too becomes part of the back-
ground, and can escape the sharpest eyes.

boHerf ly
pupae

mo-hh
cocoons

Here are some of the moths and
butterflies you may meet some day.

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and

sees

Wasps and bees build houses to protect their young. Some
wasp and bee mothers work all alone to build separate nur-
series for each of their eggs.

A mud-dauber wasp builds small round rooms of the mud
she collects from puddles, and lays an egg in each one. She
fills each room full of spiders which she has stung to sleep
with her stinger. The spiders are still alive but they can't
feel or move. That is how a wasp keeps its food fresh until
it is ready to be eaten.

When the egg hatches into a grub, it eats the sleeping
spiders until it is grown up and able to catch
food for itself.

The mother carpenter bee makes a tunnel in
wood. The separate nurseries for each egg are
separated by walls which she makes of sawdust
mixed with her saliva. She leaves a tiny loaf of
bee-bread, made of honey and pollen, for each
grub to eat until it grows up and bores its way
through to the outside world.

There are other wasps, and also bees, who live
and work together and build large houses with
many nurseries for their young.

39

carpen-\-er Vaee

Wasps who live together build tl\eir houses of thin sheets
of paper. Wasps have been making paper much longer than
people have. They shave off bits of dead wood which they
chew to a pulp and mix with the sticky saliva in their mouths.
When they spread this paste out, it dries as paper.

From the outside, a paper wasp's house looks like a grey
balloon with a tiny opening for a door at the bottom. Inside,
it is divided into layers called combs which are suspended
from one another and from the ceiling by strong paper pillars.
Each comb is made of many six-sided cells, fitted tightly to-
gether. A thick paper covering surrounds all the combs. It

(combinftdl frorr> vcir«e>ua Sources)

40

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protects the nest and keeps out rain and cold.

A young mother wasp starts to build the nest and makes a
comb, where she lays her eggs. The eggs hatch into grubs
which she feeds every day. They have big sucking feet to hold
them in their upside-down cells, for if they fall out, they have
no way to get back, and they die.

But the grubs that are able to hold on, eat and grow big.
They make paper caps for their cells and go to sleep as pupae
inside. Later they creep out as worker wasps who take over
die housekeeping duties from their mother. As the family
grows, they build more combs inside the nest. Then, bit by
bit, they enlarge the paper covering of their nest by scraping
paper off the inside and plastering it on the outside, and by
adding new material. They catch insects and make them into
a paste to feed the newly hatched grubs.

Near the end of the summer, the mother wasp lays eggs
which grow into males, called drones, and females. The males
and females mate. Then, when the cold weather comes, all
the wasps in the nest die except the young females. They sleep
in some cozy spot during the winter, and each one may begin
a new wasp's nest in the spring.

Wasps live in their nests only in the summertime, and they
do not use an old nest over again another year.

41

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coppecA c.e.l\S.

Wild honeybees live together and build their combs inside
old tree trunks. People who raise bees build small houses,
called hives in which the bees make their own combs.

All bees' combs are divided into six-sided cells like those
of wasps, but they are made of wax. Many bees share in
building them even from the very beginning. Worker bees
make wax inside themselves out of the flowering nectar and
pollen they eat, though no one knows how. They squeeze
the wax through slots in their stomachs and chew the wax
and mix it with saliva. Then each worker takes a turn at shap-
ing the wax into cells.

There is only one queen bee in each hive and she lays all
the eggs, one in each cell. When the eggs hatch, the worker
nursemaids feed the grubs bee-bread and keep them clean.

While the nursemaids are busy with the young bees, other

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mode^rn beeKxve,

workers fly busily back and forth from the fields
of clover and the flower gardens. They collect
nectar with their long tongues and make it into
honey inside themselves and collect pollen in the
"market baskets" on their hind legs. Still oJ:her
workers pack the honey and pollen into storage
cells for the bees to eat in the wintertime.

The male bees, called drones, do not collect food and have
no stings to defend themselves. In the fall, when the mating
season is over and the honey stores must be saved for the
winter, the drones are driven from the hive to die.

When the beehive gets too crowded, big, pear-shaped cells
are built where the special queen eggs are laid. The queen
grubs which hatch from the eggs are fed a special royal jelly
to make them grow larger than all the others. Then, before
the first grown-up new queen has
crept from her cell, the old queen,
who may live for several years, flies
away with workers to start a new hive
somewhere else. The first young
queen to be born becomes the new
mother of the old hive.

more

There are many other exciting bugs. There's the daddy-
long-legs, which has eight of the longest legs of any bug.
There is the millipede, which has dozens of legs yet runs
slowly and curls up into a ball when it is
frightened.

Perhaps one day you reached for a twig - and
it walked away from you. That was a bug called
a walking stick.

Maybe you've been frightened by the fierce
praying mantis, which is the only
bug that can turn its head about as
you can. It doesn't hurt people, but
it snatches hornets or beetles or bees
out of the air with its spiny front
legs. In Japan, the praying mantis is
often tied to a bedpost, to catch mosquitoes at
night.

The water strider can skate. Its legs skim over
the water and its shadow chases behind it on the
bottom of the pool.

Then there are the tiny tree hoppers, which
have faces like Hallowe'en masks, as you can see

if you look at them under a magnifying glass.

There is the dragonfly, which has legs but never walks.
It swoops through the air at sixty miles an hour. It may hurt
if it bumps into you, but it never stings or bites
people.

An ant lion digs itself a pit in the sand and
buries itself at the bottom with only its jaws
sticking out. When bugs slip down the steep
sloping sides, they are caught in its
waiting jaws !

The caddis fly's larva lives and
breathes under water like a fish. It
builds itself a case for protection, out

of bits of sand and shells and pebbles cemented
together with'the silk it spins.

Some day you will meet the bugs in this book
again, and you will be meeting lots and lots of
new bugs, too. Perhaps you can discover their
secrets if you open your eyes and ears and wait
and watch.

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