Bugs, Cicadas, Aphids, and Scale-insects 203 



feeding insects, is found. This difference in food-habit is accompanied 

 by more or less obvious structural differences. In the predaceous forms 

 the fore legs are usually spined and fitted for seizing and holding the living 

 victims, the other legs fitted for swift running, the beak is stout, firm, and 

 sharp-pointed, the eyes are often large, protuberant, and flashing bright, 

 and there is a general unmistakable air of ferocity about these miniature 

 bloodthirsty dragons of the garden shrubbery. 



Five of the terrestrial families of Heteroptera are predaceous, the remain- 

 ing eleven being composed of sap-suckers, although in one or two of these 

 families a few species seem to have acquired a taste for blood-sucking. 



The largest predaceous family is that of the assassin-bugs, wheel-bugs, 

 and soldier-bugs, the Reduviidae. More than fifty genera belonging to- 

 this family are represented in this country, but so little are the bugs col- 

 lected or even noticed by amateurs (or professionals either, for that matter) 

 that but few of the species can be said to be at all familiarly known. And' 

 to use the word "familiarly" in this connection is to indulge in the figure 

 of speech known as hyperbole. 



The Reduviids have an unmistakable look of ferocity, small and insig- 

 nificant creatures as they are. The eyes are usually large and protuberant, 

 looking like a pair of shining black beads set on the small outstretched head. 

 The beak, 3-segmented, is strong, sharp-pointed, and large for the small 

 head that carries it, and it projects forward in a suggestively eager way. 

 While the ground or body color of the bugs is usually black, they are often 

 conspicuously marked with blood-red and sometimes with yellow. The 

 wingless young are in many species wholly red. A few years ago the news- 

 papers were filled with references to a much dreaded "kissing-bug" (one 

 of the Reduviids), the name being a satire on the stinging and poisoning: 

 capabilities of the bug's beak or mouth. The sting, i.e., piercing by the 

 beak, of the kissing-bug, and of all other Reduviids, is poisonous because 

 of the injection of saliva into the wound, and this poisoning, which makes 

 such a wound often very painful and sometimes rather serious to man, must 

 be paralyzing and fatal to the more usual insect victims of the assassin-bugs. 

 The usual "kissing-bug" of the newspapers is the masked bedbug-hunter, 

 Opsicoetus personatus, an insect from ^ to f inch long, blackish brown, 

 with prothorax strongly constricted in the middle and longitudinally 

 grooved along the middle of the upper surface. The entomologists'" 

 name for this insect comes from the fact that the young exude a sticky 

 substance over the body to which dust, lint, etc., adhere so as to cover or 

 mask the body, and that the bugs enter houses and prey on bedbugs, cock- 

 roaches, and flies. The bite or sting is unusually poisonous and severe. 



Another assassin-bug which forces its acquaintance on us is the "big 

 bedbug," or cone-nose, Conorhinus sanguisugus (Fig. 282), which comes- 



