ANT COMMUNITIES 



would hardly charm an Asaph,or aHaydn,or aBeethoven; 

 for it is simply the grating sound produced by rubbing 

 the palps against the base of the proboscis. But, then, 

 the bees are not dainty in their musical taste, as witness 

 our boyhood's recollection of a throng of excited villagers 

 following a swarm of bees across the fields, with jangling 

 of cow-bells and clanging of tin pans, moved by the tradi- 

 tional faith that bees would thus be charmed to " settle." 



Thus we are brought to another form of insect lan- 

 guage stridulation. Our typical bee, unlike the Atropos 

 moth, is not gifted in this wise. But the art is possessed 

 by some spiders, and one species, akin to the tarantula, 

 gets therefrom her specific name stridulans. The in- 

 sect music with which we are most familiar is thus 

 caused. The organs which produce the various notes 

 are built on the principle of the violin and mandolin. 

 In other words, they are the result of regulated friction, 

 though the degree of regulation is crude and limited. 



Take, for example, the grasshopper, whose shrilling 

 is one of our well-known autumn field-notes. On the 

 inner side of the thigh is a series of fine cogs, or teeth, 

 which one can see with the naked eye or with a hand- 

 lens. These, rubbed rapidly against the wing-covers, as 

 one might rub a file against a goose-quill, cause the grass- 

 hopper's rather cheerful chirrup (Fig. 64). 



Brunelli, an observer of the eighteenth century, con- 

 fined in a closet a bevy of male grasshoppers (Gryllus 

 viridissimus) , who proved quite philosophical prisoners; 

 for instead of sulking, they kept up a merry fiddling all 

 the day. A rap at the door at once stopped their note; 

 but an imitation of their chirruping, which the naturalist 

 managed to make fairly well, brought a low response 

 from a few, which soon swelled into a chorus by the 



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