Little Busybodies: The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies

E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

E. L. Beutenmuller 1. Cicada Killer 2. May-fly 3. Lacewing-fly 4. Dragon-fly 5. Aphis 6. June-Beetle 7. Cicada 8. Lady-Beetle 9. Mole Cricket
Note.—We do not think it practicable to give classifications except as they exist unnamed in the above titles: (1) straight winged: locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, katydids; (2) tooth-shaped: dragon-flies; (3) ephemerals: may-flies; (4) half-winged: leaf and tree hoppers; (5) nerve-winged: lace-wings, ant-lions, and caddis-worms; (6) two-winged: flies and mosquitoes; (7) scaly winged: butterflies and moths; (8) sheath-winged: beetles; (9) membranous-winged: bees, wasps, and ants.

We hope that the children who read this book will like the boys and girls who are in it. They are real, and the good times they have are real, as any boy or girl who has lived out-of-doors will know. And the stories are true. Peter is not always good. But do you expect a child always to be good? We do not. Sometimes, too, the frolics turn into a scramble to catch a dragon-fly that will not be caught, and there are accidents. Also, Betty and Jack work hard to win a prize which the guide gives to the child who learns most about ants.
Of course it would be impossible for five children to go in search of locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, katydids, dragon-flies, May-flies, leaf-hoppers, lace-wings, caddis-worms, butterflies, beetles, bees, wasps—and so many other six-legged creatures that among them they have wings and legs enough to fill a new Pandora's box—without having a good deal happen. And a good deal does happen. It is all true enough, and every word about the six-legged busybodies is true as true. The other books, too, that come after this in our Story-Told Science Series will be every word true.
And we who wrote this book? Well, we, too, have been children. We used to climb trees and turn somersaults; why—But that is another story! And we remember so well what it used to be like to have to learn dull things we did not wish to know. So we said to ourselves, as we looked over our spectacles at each other, No, they sha'n't be told a single uninteresting fact; they sha'n't be dull, poor dears, as we were so long ago, before we put on spectacles and began to call ourselves wise.