38 The Book of Bugs. 



male mosquito has probably the keenest musical sensi- 

 bilities of any of his class of animals. He has quite a 

 brush of hairs on his antennae, and with them he hears. 

 Mayer stuck one of his kind on a glass plate and sounded 

 tuning forks about. When one tone was made certain 

 hairs would vibrate, while all the others were still. 

 Another tone would start another set to vibrating, and 

 so on. Also, if the tuning fork were at one side of the 

 mosquito, the hairs on that antenna trembled most 

 violently, so that when the male hears, or rather feels, the 

 voice of his beloved in one antenna, he wheels about so 

 that the vibration is equal in both and flies straight ahead 

 to meet her. 



This is about all there is to the male mosquito, except 

 that he cannot bite for the sufficient reason that he has 

 no apparatus with which to saw through the skin. So to 

 speak, he has the pumps, but no drill. If he eats at all 

 after he comes out in wings, it is as much as his contract 

 calls for. But the female is thoroughly equipped for get- 

 ting through even a politician's hide. In her an insect's 

 ordinary biting jaws are represented by four fine-pointed 

 bristles barbed at the tip like a spear. A straight cylindri- 

 cal spike, no thicker than a hair, forms a trough for them 

 to lie in. At its end it opens out into two small, fleshy 

 lips, corresponding to the folding leaves of the blow-fly's 

 proboscis. When these lips are pressed against the flesh, 

 the bristles are compressed into one drill, forced down the 

 trough in which they had been lying, and into the skin, 

 separated in the middle and bent back toward the insect's 

 breast. 



The mystery is what possesses her to want to bite 

 at all. How r does she come by her hankering for blood? 

 The scientists give it up. If she laid her eggs in the wound, 

 like the carrion-fly, it would be easy to answer the ques- 



