Then the glowworm is a beetle. Perhaps you may have seen its little pale green lamp shining in the grass on a summer evening. The light comes from a liquid inside the hind part of the body, the skin of which is transparent, and forms a kind of window, so that it can shine through; and the insect has the power of turning on its light and shutting it off at will. The lamp of the female beetle is very much brighter than that of the male, and while the male has both wing-cases and wings, and can fly very well indeed, those of the female are so small that one can hardly see them. Indeed, she looks much more like a grub than a beetle. DEATHWATCHES AND OIL-BEETLES Deathwatches are small brown beetles which burrow into dead wood and call to one another by tapping with their horny heads. You may often hear them if you happen to be lying awake at night in a room in which there is old woodwork; and in former days people were silly enough to think that when this sound was heard it was a sign that somebody in the house was going to die! That is why these beetles are called deathwatches. They are quite small, and are brown in color, with rather long feelers and legs. Crawling on grassy banks in the warm sunshine on bright spring days, you may often see a number of oil-beetles. These are large bluish-black insects which have an odd habit, if you pick them up, of squeezing out little drops of a yellow oily liquid from the joints of their legs! This oil has a pungent smell, and no doubt prevents birds, etc., from eating them. You will notice that the female beetles have enormous hind bodies, which they can hardly drag along over the ground. This is because they contain such a very large number of eggs, thirty thousand often being laid by a single beetle. She places them in batches in holes in the ground, and very soon afterward they hatch, and odd-looking little grubs with six long legs come out of them. No sooner have they left the egg-shells than these tiny creatures hunt about for a flower with sweet juices, which is likely to be visited by a wild bee. When they find one, they climb up the stem and hide among the petals. Then, when the bee comes, they spring upon it and cling to its hairy body, and so are carried back to its nest, where they feed upon the food which the bee had stored up for its little ones. WEEVILS AND OTHER BEETLES A great many beetles have a long beak in front of the head, with the jaws at the very tip. These are called weevils, and many of them are very mischievous. Grain of various kinds, for example, is destroyed in enormous quantities by the wheat-weevil and the rice-weevil, while the nut-weevil is the cause of those "bad" nuts which no doubt most of you know only too well. The mother beetle bores a hole through the shell of the nut while it is small, and the little grub which hatches out from the egg she leaves inside it feeds upon the kernel, leaving nothing behind but a quantity of evil-tasting black dust.