208 Bugs, Cicadas, Aphids, and Scale-insects 
south cotton and beans are also attacked by lace-bugs. The most familiar 
eastern species is the hawthorn lace-bug, Corythuca arcuata, which is com¬ 
mon on the leaves of hawthorn-bushes. The bugs keep almost exclusively 
on the under side of the leaves. The eggs are laid in small groups on the 
leaves, each egg being imbedded in a little bluntly conical mass of a brown 
sticky substance which hardens soon after egg-laying and looks much like 
a small fungus. The top of the glistening 
white egg can be seen, however, by looking 
down on one of these brown masses. The 
young is broadly oval and flattened in shape, 
brown and spiny, and moults five times in its 
development. The torn, delicate, whitish 
exuviae (cast skins) stick to the leaf. The 
adults hibernate under the fallen leaves 
on the ground beneath the bushes. In 
California a similar lace-bug, Corythuca sp., 
(Fig. 287), infests the Christmas berry, 
Heteromeles arbutijolia, a plant whose clusters 
of bright red berries take the place in Cali¬ 
fornian Christmas-tide decorations of the 
holly of the East. The eggs (Fig. 287) are 
deposited in the same way as the hawthorn 
lace-bugs’, and the life-history is practically 
the same. But because the California winter 
is much less severe and the Christmas berry 
is covered with green leaves all the year, active lace-bugs, young as well 
as adult, can always be found on the bushes. Lace-bugs, small as they 
are, injure any plant on which they gather in numbers, by the continual 
draining away of the sap. Spraying the infested bushes or trees with 
kerosene emulsion (p. 189) will kill the insects. 
The flattest of all the bugs, flatter than the bedbugs even, are the 
curious members of the small family Aradidae. They live in the cracks or 
beneath the bark of decaying trees, and their dull brown color and flat leaf¬ 
like body make them very difficult to distinguish when at rest in their hiding- 
places. The glistening white eggs are laid under the bark. The flatbugs 
are often mistaken for bedbugs, as they are nocturnal and are often found 
in log cabins. But they probably feed exclusively on plant-sap, being 
especially attracted to mills and recently felled trees, where they suck up the 
sap exuding from the cut or sawed logs. Aradus cinnamomeus (Fig. 288) 
is about the same size as a full-grown bedbug and is reddish in tinge, so that 
superficially it does much resemble a bedbug. But all the adult flatbugs 
have wings, while all the bedbugs are wingless. 
Fig. 287. — The lace-bug, Cory¬ 
thuca sp., of the California 
Christmas berry, Heteromeles 
arbutijolia; at bottom, eggs on 
small tubercles on leaf; above, 
just-hatched young, intermediate 
stage, and adult. (Eight times 
natural size.) 
