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NATURE’S CRAFTSMEN 
ing style. Its food at first is plant lice and other 
soft-bodied creatures, but as it grows larger and 
stronger it attacks larger insects, and when full 
grown is a great slaughterer of the caterpillars 
which feed on the foliage of trees. The bugs are 
not truly grown up until after the fourth moult, 
at which time they lose their red protective colors 
and appear in dull black, developing also a pecu¬ 
liar crest on their thorax by which scientists know 
them as the crested assassins. The shape of this 
crest is a half-circular cog-wheel with nine teeth; 
hence the popular name of wheel bug. 
“ There are more than one hundred and fifty 
kinds of assassin bugs in the United States. All 
are about the same size and shape, though vari¬ 
ously colored. Their murderous beak fitted for 
piercing and sucking characterizes them. All of 
the tribe exists over the winter in queer-shaped 
eggs, and the young are shielded by protective 
coloring and various dust and web camouflages. 
A certain species called the thread-legged bug, or 
Emesa longpipes, is one of the oddest specimens 
imaginable. It has enormously long thin legs, 
and as it creeps along in search of prey it seems to 
thrust its narrow pipe-like body up and down. 
The longpipes is an artful brigand which haunts 
the vicinity of spiders’ webs, maliciously cutting 
down the ‘ meat ’ which the weavers hang for 
their own use. 
