Of the wild creatures of our back yards, none is better known than this hard-shelled buzzing creature, which whirs into the circle of light around your lamp and commits suicide, if you will let it, by flying into the flame.
It is one of the so-called June bugs, or May beetles, which every boy and girl knows, and is not the June beetle of which the larva was shown previously.
Its hard, pitted skeleton covers it completely, and it is most interesting to watch it open its wing covers with great deliberation, unfold the wings which are carefully stowed away beneath them, and holding its wing covers elevated so they will not interfere, start the transparent wings into motion and fly away with the whir of a miniature aerodrome. Indeed, it was this resemblance which caused the members of the Aerial Experiment Association to name one of their first aerodromes after it, and the first trophy ever given for an aerodrome flight was won by Curtis’s “June Bug.”
This creature’s first life is spent beneath the sod of your lawn, where it curls up around the roots of the grasses and clover and other plants which you do not want it to eat, and the first year of its subterranean existence it is the white grub, with the brown head, which everybody knows. At the end of the second summer of its life it changes to a soft brown beetle, which throughout the winter is hardening its shell preparatory to coming out in late spring as a winged creature to feed upon the leaves of trees. The beetle which is walking toward you lives upon the oak.
ONE OF THE TWIG-PRUNERS
(Elaphidion atomaricum, Dru.)
The long-horned beetles, as they are called, are remarkable for the length of their antennæ and for their eyes of many facets, which almost encircle the antennæ at their base. They have, like other beetles, two lives, so to speak, and their grub-life is spent inside some twig or branch, burrowing and living on the juices which their stomachs extract from the sawdust made by their jaws. They kill the twig they burrow in, so that the wind blows it to the ground, and they go through their transformation on the ground. The story is told of a long-horned beetle, belonging to a different species, that lived for years in its larval stage, burrowing patiently into the dry wood of a boot-last or shoe-stretcher, trying vainly to get enough nourishment out of it to make a beetle of itself.