on crops in the garden or field, collect
a leaf with a few on it and carefully transfer them to the leaves on
your potted plants. Watch the lice feed and increase from day to day. A
reading lens or a magnifying glass will be helpful as plant-lice are
very small. How do they move about? Can you count their legs? How many
have they? Can you see their eyes and feelers? When feeding observe how
the beak is pressed against the leaf. Disturb one while it is feeding
and see it attempt to loosen its mouth parts.

[Illustration: Common apple aphis showing a winged and wingless agamic
summer forms at a and c, one with wing pads formed at b, and a recently
born young at d. (After U. S. Dept. Agri.)]

In the garden examine and see if you can find lady-beetles or other
parasites attacking the lice. Collect some of the enemies of the lice
for your collection. Make a gallon of tobacco tea by soaking one pound
of tobacco stems or waste tobacco in one gallon of water for a day or
use one ounce of forty per cent nicotine sulphate in three gallons of
soap suds and spray or sprinkle infested bushes or vegetables with it.
In an hour examine and see what effect it has had on the plant-lice.
Nicotine is the most effective chemical for killing plant-lice. Do any
of the lice develop wings? If so, how many? Wings develop on some of the
lice at times when a plant or crop becomes too heavily infested by them.
This enables some of the lice to spread to new food plants before old
plants are completely destroyed and the colony of lice starved.

[Illustration: Wooly apple aphis, showing how they cluster in masses on
limbs and secrete the white, wooly protection over their bodies.]

Make a careful enlarged drawing of a winged plant-louse and a wingless
one showing legs, feelers, beak, honey dew tubes on back and body
segmentation. If ants are seen to attend the lice observe them carefully
and describe their work. The ants feed on a sweet honey dew excretion
discharged by the lice.

CHAPTER XVI

THE HONEY BEE

"_Simple and sweet is their food; they eat no flesh of the living._"

--VON KUEBEL.

One can hardly believe that this small, ever busy creature each year
gathers many million dollars worth of products for man in this country
alone to say nothing of its inestimable value on the farm and especially
in the orchard, where it assists in carrying pollen from blossom to
blossom. It is of far g