Our Eccentric \ Insect / Neighbors 
THE SYMPHONY OF FIELD AND WOOD—HOW 
FOR PRIVATE PERFORMANCES—THEIR HOME 
—WHAT IS A BUG ? 
M ID-SUMMER is carnival time 
in the insect world. How few 
of us stop to classify the myriad 
sounds that come from the meadows 
and tree-top vegetation! Yet what a 
killing silence would shatter the lan¬ 
guor of the summer night if all the 
insect songsters were to stop abruptly 
their serenades! How little we know 
of these innumerable legions that lurk 
in the grass-jungles! But the smallest 
fraction of their numbers flit over the 
fields by day, dance about our lights at 
night, or show phosphorescent flashes 
as they fly. At dusk we stop for a 
moment by the hedge and listen — lis¬ 
ten carefully, as if we were studying 
the technical rendition of a great or¬ 
chestra. The predominating sound is 
a loud buzz, but its several cadences 
show it to come from various individ¬ 
uals — some large, some small. And The 
Katy-did sings by scraping 
at the base o 
this barely reduces immediate recog¬ 
nition of a continuous sharp chatter. 
These predominating sounds might be called the accompaniment 
for a sharp and cheery trill, continuous, but its monotony relieved 
by a broken high treble from another songster. As the ear be¬ 
comes acute there is another note, precisely imitating the jingling 
of tiny bells. From this great nocturnal orchestra of tiny folk 
are many other sounds, but what a shock it is to the popular 
observer to be told by the scientist that all these insect sounds 
that come with the night—that have inspired poets to enthusiastic 
effort—come from members of the order that contains the de¬ 
spised cockroach ! Butterflies, beetles and their like are always 
silent, as are the members of the greater number of insect orders. 
Thus, at the beginning we find that many pet theories about our 
insect neighbors may be exploded when we search for facts. 
Many eccentric traits about the local insects are little known. 
It is interesting to learn, for instance, that the large, beautiful 
moths that flutter about the lamp at night have no mouth parts, 
and from the time they leave the silken cocoon they necessarily 
fast until they die; also that the insect's brain is in the breast, or, 
with some, in the body; that no insect breathes through the mouth, 
but through a series of apertures on the sides of the body; that 
no insect sings bv means of vocal chords, but all the singing kinds 
have either hardened edges on the wings, which they scrape to¬ 
gether, rub the legs against the wings, or have miniature kettle¬ 
drums attached to the body; that spiders are not true insects and 
are actually headless creatures with a group of four or more eyes 
upon the back and the mouth in the breast; and, finally, it is in¬ 
teresting to know that the snare-spinning spider, with its ghastly 
assortment of insect carcasses decorating the web, has deadly 
and invariably victorious enemies among the insects themselves. 
Certain species of wasps sting the spiders as they lie in wait for 
victims, then pluck the benumbed creature from its death-trap and 
carry it away as food for the wasp larvae—the narcotized spider 
to survive and thus remain fresh until devoured by the hatching 
maggots. 
From the standpoint of destructiveness, few of us realize the 
together the roughened patches 
f her wings 
THE MUSICIANS CAN BE ASSEMBLED 
LIFE AND WHAT THEY LIKE TO EAT 
by Raymond L. D i t m a r s 
tremendous importance of insect life 
and the need for constant study to 
keep in bounds the injurious species 
and cultivate their enemies. The ene¬ 
mies of the destructive insects are to 
be found among the legions of insects 
themselves, among the mammals, 
birds, reptiles and amphibians. The 
common toad is an ever-busy insect 
destroyer. The United States Gov¬ 
ernment recently made a study of the 
annual losses to the people of this 
country by the ravages of destructive 
insects. The figures are appalling. 
Some of them appear as follows: 
Annual Loss 
Cereals . $200,000,000 
Hay . 53,000,000 
Cotton . 60,000,000 
Tobacco . 5,300,000 
Truck Crops. .. 53,000,000 
Sugars . 5,000,000 
Fruits . 27,000,000 
Farm Forests.. 11 ,ooo.oco 
Miscellaneous Crops. 5,800.000 
Total . 
. $420,100,000 
These figures were prepared by "experts in the Department of 
Agriculture. 
From the viewpoint of classification, the Class of Insects is 
divided into a number of orders. The most familiar of these 
is the Coleoptera, containing the beetles; the Lcpidoptcra, em¬ 
bracing the butterflies and moths; the Neuroptera with the 
dragon flies and antiions; the Hymenoptera , composed of the 
ants, bees and wasps; the Diptera or flies; the Orthoptera or 
order of grasshoppers, crickets, roaches and the like, and the 
Memiptera, or true bugs. Thus, from the point of classification, 
we see that the common term “bug." as applied to all insects, is 
quite incorrect. A true bug is an insect with a beak that sucks 
the juices of plants or the blood of animals. It has no mouth 
parts for chewing, and we might think the order is made up 
altogether of lowly kinds of insects. This is not the case. Many 
of the bugs are lowly and unattractive of form, but there are 
equal numbers that are large and beautifully colored. The seven¬ 
teen-year locust belongs to the order of true bugs. A few of 
the bugs — not many of them — are among the loudest of the 
“singing" insects. These are the cicadas, or harvest flies — im¬ 
properly called “locusts,” and have a pair of miniature kettle¬ 
drums mounted on the body. Nearly all the remainder of the 
singing insects belong to the Orthoptera, and among these the 
true locusts, members of the grasshopper family, predominate in 
number, together with the crickets. These are near allies of the 
roaches, walking sticks and our familiar katy-did (really a tree 
“grass”-hopper). 
We should also understand the strange life histories of these 
creatures. It is a common idea that every insect begins life as 
a caterpillar or grub, but this is not correct, as members of the 
different orders have ‘widely different life histories. The moths 
begin life as caterpillars, eating several times their weight in 
leaves the day, spin a silken cocoon, shed the caterpillar skin 
and writhe out of it as a pupa—an object looking much like a 
withered mummy. Under the hard brown pupa shell many won- 
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