(Coleoptera)
Beetles are distinguished from the other orders of flying creatures by having the first pair of wings changed into shells under which the other pair can be safely folded and laid away. You can usually recognize them when they spread their wings to fly, for they have to raise their wing covers in order to do so. Also they generally have prominent jaws, as they are biting creatures and do not suck the juices of plants and animals as the bugs do.
Beetles are almost everywhere. You cannot turn over a stone or break down a stump or roll over a log without disturbing some of them, and yet perhaps less is known about the lives of beetles than about those of any other of the great orders of insects.
They lead two lives, distinct as two lives can be: one in the form of a grub, the other as a full-grown beetle. To make the transformation, they burrow into the ground or into the wood of trees and but rarely make for themselves silken cocoons such as the butterfly larvæ spin.
They do not lead so aerial an existence as some other orders, but, nevertheless, they are today, perhaps because of their closely fitting outer shells, the predominant order of insects of the present epoch and already there are known the bewildering number of 150,000 species. In North America alone (Mexico excepted) 12,000 species have been described and these have been grouped into eighty families and 2,000 genera. The general public is beginning to realize that not everyone can be an entomologist, and that the quality of brains and training required before one can travel safely among this maze of forms and distinguish between the friends and foes of our agriculture is a quality of the greatest value to mankind.
So far as man is concerned, this gigantic class of creatures is among the most destructive with which we divide life on this planet, and though there are beetle friends which help us by preying on other beetles and by making humus out of leaves and twigs, and by feeding millions of our song birds, yet, as a whole, they represent a restless, armored multitude which perhaps we should be just as well without.
THE JUNE BEETLE