234 EYE SPY 
haps, completely encircling it, and thus remaining 
for weeks, the full-grown aphis at last attaining a 
length of about three-sixteenths of an inch. 
A similar brood is sometimes seen in profusion 
on beech-trees and also on the apple-tree. But if 
we imagine that because these insects are with- 
out teeth they are therefore harmless, we are 
greatly mistaken. What they lack in individual 
effect they fully compensate for in numbers, and 
the combined attack of a girdle of thousands of 
these sucking beaks, for weeks absorbing the sap, 
may often result in the death of the branch be- 
yond them. 
Dr. Harris, in his admirable work on " Insects 
Injurious to Vegetation," tells us that " in Glou- 
cestershire, England, so many apple-trees were de- 
stroyed by these lice in the year 1810 that the 
making of cider had to be abandoned. So in- 
fested were many of the trees that they seemed, 
at a short distance, as if they had been white- 
washed." 
Other insects, such as the flea and the mos- 
quito, are also possessed of similar " beaks for 
sucking," but neither of these examples is a bug, 
both being flies the flea merely a wingless fly 
with wonderfully developed legs. Our entomolo- 
gy tells us that a bug is a member of the Hemip- 
tera, meaning "half-winged;" the wings of the 
typical bug, like the squash-bug, being transparent 
