second pair to be extended to carry the body. The wings of 
the second pair are membranous and about twice as long as the 
first pair. Therefore, to be concealed under the elytra, they 
must be folded or doubled-in lengthwise and crosswise by a 
sort of hinge beyond their middle. The folding is also clumsy, 
and the wing is gathered over the body with difficulty. The 
legs of the Colorado beetle are strong, terminated by a pair of 
hooks, by which it clings to plants. 
The mouth is formed for biting and not for sucking, as in 
most of our previous subjects. If we examine closely we will 
observe an upper lip and a lower lip, and between them two 
pairs of jaws, which do not move up and down but laterally. One 
pair of jaws, the upper pair, is called the mandibles. They are 
strong and hard, used for biting off bits of leaves. It is this 
pair of jaws that is so remarkably developed in the stag beetles , 
known to some children as "pinching bugs.” The second pair 
of jaws is called the maxilla. They are used for chewing the 
food. To them, as well as to the lower lip, are attached little 
jointed arms, called palpi. 
These insects have great power of endurance. They will walk 
for great distances in search of food, and, by direct experiment, 
they are known to have lived thirty days without food. In the 
spring, the beetles appear along with the first growth of potatoes, 
and while they devour some of the foliage of the potato plants, 
the damage is slight as compared with the destruction caused 
by the larvae of the succeeding brood. These early beetles lay 
their eggs upon the leaves of the potato. We may find the 
orange colored eggs in masses, varying from a dozen to fifty, 
closely placed upon the under side of the potato leaf. It is 
said that a single female may lay as many as one thousand 
eggs in its lifetime. The eggs are sometimes found upon leaves 
Qf grass, smartweed, or other plants in the potato field. They 
hatch about a week later into peculiar looking hunchbacked 
grubs or larvae of a reddish color, with markings of black spots 
in double rows on each side. The larvae walk to the tenderest 
part of the plant and there feed very rapidly, increasing in size 
by successive moults until they are full grown. The length of 
time in the larval state is fifteen to twenty days, when they 
leave the plant and go into the ground a few inches below the 
surface and there pupate in a cell of earth. In about ten days 
3 
