Word: insectes
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...group of third-and fourth-graders swarmed through the Vermont statehouse last January and persuaded legislators to designate Apis mellifera (the honeybee) as the state's official insect. Argued one of the young lobbyists: "Bees are industrious, just like us Vermonters." The bill was duly signed into law by Governor Richard A. Snelling...
...mosquito feeds on the larvae of more common, biting and disease-carrying cousins, like the Aedes aegypti, which also breeds in pools and water-filled containers. Although the Tx. rutilus is found from Florida to Canada and as far west as Texas, it is not very prolific by insect standards and does not exist naturally in numbers large enough to control the population of other mosquitoes. That deficiency presents no problem to USDA Entomologist Dana Focks, who has learned to mass-produce the creature in his Gainesville, Fla., laboratory. Says Focks: "Toxorhynchites are found everywhere and are feasible...
...designation of "official" animals, birds, fishes, minerals, poems, songs and flowers. Last year, after interminable conflict among advocates of barbecue, gumbo and chili, Texas legislators finally designated the last as State Dish. This year a skirmish shaped up in the New York legislature over the selection of a State Insect (praying mantis vs. Karner blue butterfly), and in New Jersey over a State Fish (bluefish leading); a struggle over the wild turkey left Alabama still, alas, without a State Game Bird...
Vermont, in a flurry of accomplishment, designated a State Cold Water Fish (trout), a State Warm Water Fish (walleyed pike) and a State Insect (honey bee). The Massachusetts general court, though moving hardly at all on important issues, considered (and, amazingly, rejected) the adoption of a State Poem with the opening line, "Chickadee, chickadee, chickadee ..." Connecticut, which got along for 190 years without a State Song, obtained one at last when the legislature picked Yankee Doodle-after replacing the word girls with folks. Widely criticized years ago for ending a session in which the designation of the Great Dane...
...first time, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved for commercial use as a pesticide an insect sex pheromone, the scent emitted by a female to attract males. The new substance, being marketed by Albany International under the trade name Gossyplure H.F., is actually a synthesized version of the scent given off by female pink bollworm moths. These insects produce caterpillars that eat their way through the cotton crops in Southern California and Arizona, costing farmers some $40 million a year in damage and control expenses...