Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/517

Rh them in strange places and under many disguises, for they can not migrate, as do the majority of the birds, nor can they live an active life while the source of their food supply, the plants, are inactive.

The majority of those insects which next May or June will be found feeding on the buds or leaves of our trees, or crawling wormlike over the grass of our lawns, or burrowing beneath the roots of our garden plants, are represented in the winter by the eggs alone. These eggs are deposited in autumn by the mother insect, on or near the object destined to furnish the young, or larvae, their food. Each egg corresponds to a seed of one of our annual plants, being, like it, but a form of life so fashioned and fitted as to withstand for a long period intense cold; the mother insect, like the summer form of the plant, succumbing to the first-severe frost.

Thus myriads of the eggs of grasshoppers are in the early autumn deposited in the ground, in compact masses of forty to sixty each. About mid-April they begin to hatch, and the sprightly little insects, devoid of wings, but otherwise like their parents, are seen on every hand.

A comparatively small number of insects pass the winter in the larval or active stage of the young. Of these, perhaps the best known is the brown "woolly worm" or "hedgehog caterpillar," as it is familiarly called. It is thickly covered with stiff black hairs on each end, and with reddish hairs on the middle of the body. These hairs appear. to be evenly and closely shorn, so as to give the animal a velvety look; and as they have a certain degree of elasticity, and the caterpillar curls up at the slightest touch, it generally manages to slip away when taken into the hand. Beneath loose bark, boards, rails, and stones, this caterpillar may be found in midwinter, coiled up and apparently life-less. On the first bright, sunny days of spring it may be seen crawling rapidly over the ground, seeking the earliest vegetation which will furnish it a literal "breakfast." In April or May the chrysalis, surrounded by a loose cocoon formed of the hairs of the body interwoven with coarse silk, may be found in situations similar to those in which the larva passed the winter. From this, the perfect insect, the Isabella tiger moth, emerges about the last of June. It is a medium-sized moth, dull orange in color, with three rows of small black spots on the body, and some scattered spots of the same color on the wings.

By breaking open rotten logs one can find in midwinter the grubs or larvæ of many of the wood-boring beetles, and, beneath logs and stones near the margins of ponds and brooks, hordes of the maggots or larvæ of certain kinds of flies may often be found huddled together in great masses. The larvæ of a few butterflies