flesh-eating ant-lion. The egg hatches into a clumsy, humped, bug-like creature, with spiny hairs to which wet sand sticks. It has six digging legs, and jaws like a mouse trap. It makes a round pit about as big as would be made by pressing the bottom of a small teacup into the sand. When an ant or other little creeper runs over the edge of the pit, it just naturally slides down hill. Before it can climb out again it is snapped up by the half buried ant-lion.
Another sand-dweller with a lair is the tiger beetle. It is brave in a shiny armor of copper, golden green, sand color or pea green with white spots, and is striped and spotted like a tiger or leopard. Its jaws are long, horny, hooked and toothed, and they shut together like the blades of scissors. The larva of the tiger beetles dig pits in which they lie, mouth and eyes out, snapping up all small insects that come their way.
Did you ever catch a pretty red, black-spotted lady-bird beetle on a rose bush, and say:
Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home.
Your house is on fire, your children will burn!
lady-bird
It fairly leaped in wild alarm, when you let it go. Lady-birds cannot walk well, so they are easily captured, but they can fly. There are black lady-birds with red or yellow spots, too. Do you know why you can find them on rose bushes and fruit trees? They eat those little soft green plant lice, or aphides, that swarm on certain plants. In England gardeners hunt for these neat insects to put into flower gardens, orchards and hop fields. If they couldn't get these little friends in any other way, very likely they'd be willing to pay for them.
French gardeners really do pay four and five cents a piece for ugly, warty little hop toads. Toads eat almost anything—red spiders, flies, wasps, caterpillars and moths. And they just dote on cabbage and green salad worms. Nothing touches the toad. He has no teeth to bite, or claws on his webby feet to fight with, nor a stinger. But he has glands behind his jewel-like eyes with which he can make a dreadful smell. This liquid doesn't cause warts as some people think, but it gives the toad a nice wide field of lonesomeness. He is a night prowler, coming out at dusk. In the daytime he sits in a shady place taking a mouthful of air at a gulp, now and then.
