Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 August 1874 — Nature’s Fly-Traps. [ARTICLE]

Nature’s Fly-Traps.

As the season for flies comes on, the drug stores will put Out their papers for destroying these friends of man, and the groceries will display their various traps for the same purpose. Brown paper that kills the fly mechanically, by sticking up his legs and exhausting him i«r fruitless efforts tb escape ; lead-colored paper that treacherously allures, intoxicates and poisons; green wire traps, filled with bugging swarms aw’aiting immersion into a tub or a holocaust at the kitchen stove, will tempt the money out of the pockets of afflicted housekeepers. All these contrivances are dull and brutal things. They are either grossly treacherous or wholesale traps of no interest at all as pieces of mechanism. The genius of nature has ordained that every species-of animal shall be preyed upon and destroyed by some instinctive enemy. But for the poor fly, or winged insect, she has provided a double class of enemies. On them prey not only innumerable species of animals, but also an abundant variety of vegetable growths. Ichneumons, toads, birds and spiders butcher the gentle little fly for food, while innumerable animals, from mere angry passions, Attack and destroy them. Horses and cows switch them with their tails; indeed, this seems to be the predisposing cause of switchy tails; dogs snap at them;, men slap, at them— We will not suggest so obnoxious or impracticable a scheme as substituting these animals • for the chemical and mechanical traps men have invented. An animate horse-tail will hardly do to brush flies away from the table, anil toads, however innocent in their manward habits, are a terror to the wornen and children. Spiders might be left to spin their webs were it not for that conventionalism of the ladies which links a reputation for neatness with the drawings of a-broom periodically over ceilings and down the angles of the room. But the vegtetable world can furnish us with fly-traps at once ornamental and effective, ingenious and capricious. In these days, when herbariums are affected by housekeepers, why could not a window be filled with a curious and active plant which will work infinite delight for the observer? The way to do this thing is to secure a window-box which will hold water. In this put some mosses gathered from peat-bogs or marshes, saturate them well with water, and plant out the common pitcher-plant and the sundews of our Atlantic coast. The first of these plants is only a mechanical trap. Its pitcher is filled nearly w ith water, which the flies try to drink, when they fall in and drown. Naturalists tell us that these leaves are sometimes so filled with drowned flies as to furnish a riclr nutriment to the plant. rThe sundews arc an ingenious and animated predatory flower. They know as much as a puppy four weeks old. They can’t be fooled. They will eat animal food, but they are not like the silly, sensitive plant that shuts up at every touch. Mrs. Treat tells us that her sundew's knew -Uic difference between a piece of meat and a piece of chalk. One they will shut down upon and the other they willnot touch. This plant spreads out its leaves, which are covered with little, fine bristles. On their edge they exude a delicious nectar, which the silly little fly is fond of. As soon as he puts his proboscis in the nectar, up comes the spines and fastens him down. Then the leaf curls over him and begins to digest him. This is cruel, but far more comfortable than for the flies to bite and digest us:—Providence (R. I.) Journal.