Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 October 1893 — Facts About Insects. [ARTICLE]

Facts About Insects.

Ants are provided with a poison bag, which discharges a fluid having a ctrong sulphurous smell, sufficient to drive awaym >st insect enemies. It is estimated that the chinch bug, Hessian fly, army worm ard cotton worm have cost the people of the United States more than the Civil War. The amount of silk produced by each s nd er is so small that Reaumur computes th it 663,5-2 would be required to produce a pound of thread. Termites have five different classes of society: Workers, sentinels, soldiers, males, females. Of the latter twoclasses there is only one each in every nest. Attempts have been made to produce spider silk, but have failed, the ferocious nature of these insects not permitting them to live together in communities. The clothier bee covers her nest of tgga with a cloth made from the woody fiber of plants, and thus preserves her young from the kudden cbanges’of temperature. The hornet’s nest is sometimes two feet in diameter. The outside layers have a small interval between each, so that if rain should penetrate it is soon arrested. In times of scarcity the South African natives sometimes rob the nests of the termites, and as much as five bushels of grain have been taken from a singlenest. M. De L’lsle discovered an amimalculte that could run six inches in a second, and calculated that it most move its legs no less than 1,200 times in that brief period.