Bugs, Cicadas, Aphids, and Scale-insects 191 
much like scale-insects and have the same general habits. Provided with 
a delicate long sucking-beak, each individual remains fixed in one spot on 
a green leaf, sucking up its food, the plant-sap, as it needs it. The adults 
which finally issue from the beautiful little cases have four rounded wings, 
pure white or with small dusky spots and golden yellow, finely beaded 
margins; each wing has but a single vein, and is dusted with a granular 
Tig. 260. —The California live-oak scale, Cerococcus ehrhorni. (Photograph by Rose 
Patterson; natural size.) 
white waxen powder or “bloom.” The tiny white or pale-yellow eggs 
are laid on leaves in a circle or the arc of one, in one or more rows, and 
vary in number from three to thirty; each egg has a minute but noticeable 
curving stem. The young hatch in from ten to thirteen days, and move 
freely about, but never seem to get more than about one inch from the 
deserted shells. This activity lasts for from ten to forty hours; then 
the young attach themselves to the leaf by inserting the sucking proboscis, 
