Quotes: Insects.

The idea in bold-face print is a summary of the quote. The number after the topic is the page on which the quote was found.

Insects
Insects 831 "Insects are among the earliest births of spring…a mosquito has already been heard to sound the small horror of his bugle horn; wasps infest the sunny windows of the house; a bee entered one of the chambers, with a prophecy of flowers." Hawthorne: “Buds and Bird-Voices”

Insects 126 Did insects inhabit Paradise? "An Italian author--Giulio Cordara, a Jesuit--has written a poem upon insects in which he begins by insisting that those troublesome and abominable little animals were created for our annoyance, and that they were certainly not inhabitants of Paradise." Leigh Hunt. ‘Getting Up on Cold Mornings.” 1820. Gross, ed. Essays.

Insects 113 The energy of ants. "Some people are like ants: give them a warm day and a piece of ground and they start digging." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 184 The overlooked activities of ants. "The ants dig, harvest, stow, enslave, march, make war, and tend their hatchlings beside the paths where we walk unseeing." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 184 "There are almost 90,000 species of insects in North America and 25,000 of them are beetles." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 185 Man fights them [insects] for his mastery of the earth, and they outbreed all his efforts. Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 192. Dragonflies. "Something about them [dragonflies] speaks of remote times when there were dragons, even flying dragons, of millennia past…hover and wheel in swift flight…among our most helpful insects, feeding almost entirely on gnats, flies, and mosquitoes." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 196 July. "Fly-buzz, bee-hum, mosquito whine, all are the sound of thrumming wings." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 196 July. "Some [insect wings] are incredibly swift wings…the bee and the housefly beat their wings 200 times or more per second…mosquito’s wings make 600 strokes per second…there are leisurely wings, too…big butterflies beat their wings only 10 or 20 times per second, and the dragon flies about twice that number." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 217 "As for most insects, summer is a lifetime to a katydid—birth and growth and maturity, which ends in old age and death." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 217 "Insect time ticks madly now [August], setting the tempo for buzz and scratch and hum that mark not a season but a lifetime." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 226 "They [insects] never learn—they live by instinct." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year.

Insects 256 Fall. "But to the cold-blooded ones, such as insects, who are at the mercy of the sun rather than their own inner fires for life and energy, time begins to run out when nights turn frosty." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 256 Fall. "Briefly, when the sun has asserted itself by early afternoon, life is almost normal…flies buzz, ants hurry, and late gnats dance like lively motes in the mild air…evening nears and the buzz, the haste, and the dancing are at an end." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 260 "The cricket is a small, black, ambulatory noise surrounded by a sentimental aura…lives in the open fields, but its favorite habitat is behind a couch or under a bookcase in a room where somebody is trying to read." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 260 "[The cricket] has six legs, which make it an insect; two antennae, which make it a creature of sensitive feelings; two wings that can be scraped together which make it a nuisance." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year

Insects 323 " ...paper, the primitive kind of paper hornets were making long before man tamed fire, let alone learned to write or print or bind a book." Borland, Twelve Moons of the Year