More Beetles

My hermitage boasts a long, wide lilac-walk. When May is here and the two rows of bushes, bending beneath their load of clustering blooms, form pointed arches overhead, this wal...

Twenty thousand, Réaumur [13] tells us, twenty thousand embryos in the body of the Grey Flesh-fly! [14] Twenty thousand! What does she want with this formidable family? With off...

The Fly has deserved well of hygiene. The first to come to the dead Mole, she left behind her a garrison of scavengers which, without dissecting-instruments, whether lancets or...

To describe the insect which forms the subject of this chapter, scientific nomenclature has combined two formidable names: that of the Minotaur, Minos’ Bull fed on human flesh i...

Long ago, the Minotaur’s cousins, the Geotrupes, afforded me a delightfully unusual spectacle, that of a prolonged association in pairs, a real domestic couple, working in commo...

The bamboo tripod, so alien in its arrangement to the Minotaur’s habits, might well have been the cause, in part, of the father’s premature decease. In the glass tube, only one...

This is the moment to recapitulate the Minotaur’s merits. When the severe cold is over, he sets forth in quest of a mate, buries himself with her and thenceforth remains faithfu...

This is Shrove Tuesday, a relic of the saturnalia of old; and I have it in my mind to do some strange cooking, which would have delighted the soul of a Roman gourmet. When I let...

In writing Pine Cockchafer at the head of this chapter, I am guilty of a deliberate heresy: the insect’s orthodox name is Fuller Cockchafer (Melolontha fullo, Lin.). We must not...

Alone of living creatures, civilized man knows how to eat, by which I mean to say that he treats the affairs of the stomach with a certain pomp and circumstance. He is an expert...

It is true; every pot finds its lid, every Jack his Jill. The hunchbacked, the blind, the bandy-legged, the physically or morally deformed: one and all have their attractions wh...

The anomalous is that which forms an exception to the rule, which again is based upon an aggregate of concordant facts. An insect has six legs, each ending in a finger. That is...

As I write the first lines of this chapter, I think of the Chicago slaughter-yards. Those horrible meat-factories where, in the course of the year, men cut up over a million Bul...

It is admitted that, as an ardent destroyer of caterpillars and Slugs, the Gold Beetle has pre-eminently earned his title of “Gardener”: he is the watchful keeper of our kitchen...