Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 March 1891 — Lady Birds. [ARTICLE]

Lady Birds.

Naturalists count more than fifteen kinds of lady-birds, mostly distinguished from one another by the number of their spots, set upon various grounds, red, black or yellow. The two-spotted and the seven-spotted are the most common. One of the prettiest is the seldom-seen twenty-spotted, with eleven black dots on each of her golden wing-cases. Rare sorts, sometimes seen in collections, are adorned with a checker-board pattern of little squares. Like other beetles, the lady-bird keeps her large gauzy wings concealed, except when they are iu use. They fold both lengthwise and across, and pack into an incredibly tiny compass. When spread, they are fully twice as large as those gayly decorated, horny wingcases which protect and cover them, and which are often mistaken for the wings themselves. It is an unsolved mystery whither the insect hosts betake themselves when the frost comes to put an end to their delight. We see the air teeming with gnats, and the ground populous with ants and beetles; the fields are alive with grasshoppers, the hedges full of little moths which sleep amid the foliage. All about us, active creatures in multitudes feast, dance, fiddle and blow their elfin horns; yet these myriads vanish, leaving not a trace behind. The chill autumn wind passes over them and they are gone. Whither? Their disappearance is more mysterious thau that of pins. If they "die, what becomes of their little corpses? And if they do not die, where do they hide themselves? A few, we know, creep into warm corners to sleep till the return of spring, and among this prudent minority are some of the ladv-birds. “We found, last November,” says a pleasant writer on insect lore, “no fewer than seventeen of these redcoated comrades laid up, doubtless, for their winter sleep,, to be broken only in open weather by an occasional stroll in search of some of those hardier aphides, which furnish them with no unwelcome meal between their long abstinences.” _ : r-’SI There are a set of malicious, prating, prudent gossips, both male and female, who murder characters to kill time, and will rob a fellow of his good name before he has years to know the value of it.