Marvels of Insect Life; A Popular Account of Structure and Habit (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 Excerpt: ...the ordinary way of comb-building was clearly impossible. Then the engineers of the hive, inspired by the difficulty, got to work in another way. On the wooden surface below they laid out the plan of a garner-house, not after their usual method of parallel combs, but a regular, oblong house, with cellular store-rooms and communicating passages in between. Upon this they raised storey above storey of horizontal cells, until the glass roof was nearly reached." Other wax-workei s will be found, as indicated, in the humblebees, 1 which, however, call for separate treatment. Egger-Moths. One of the best-known families of moths in this country is that-which includes the oak-egger, the lackey, the fox, the drinker. Photo by J. F. Hammond. anJ the lappet-moth. Sting Of Bees. rr The sting of the honey-bee is shown with its guard magnified twelve times. The swollen I these are all more or less body to the right is the poison-gland in connection with it, which makes the being stung-....,1.., so unpleasant a matter. familiar, either as moths or caterpillars, to all who as boys have had the run of country lanes and woods. The caterpillars attract attention by reason of the soft woolly hair with which they are clothed, and the moths by their stout bodies and their usually dense coating of scales. Another feature of the moths is the comb-like fringe of the antennae, always more highly developed in the males than in the females, which is, no doubt, a very important sense-organ. The caterpillars spin closely compacted oval cocoons, often with their no-longer-needed hairs mixed up with the silk. The name egger was probably suggested by the size and shape of these cocoons. The egg-like character of the cocoon is in some cases increased by the caterpillar discharging over...