Every autumn, the monarch butterflies east of the Rockies migrate from as far north as Canada to Mexico. Memory is not their guide — no one butterfly makes the round trip — but each year somehow find their way to the same fifty acres of forest on the high slopes of Mexico’s Neovolcanic Mountains, and then make the return trip in the spring.

In Four Wings and a Prayer, Sue Halpern sets off on an adventure to delve into the secrets behind this extraordinary phenomenon. She visits scientists and butterfly lovers across the country, offering a keenly observed portrait of the monarchs’ migration and of the people for whom they have become a glorious obsession. Combining science, memoir, and travel writing, Four Wings and a Prayer is an absorbing travelogue and a fascinating meditation on a profound mystery of the natural world.

Every year Americans use a staggering five hundred million pounds of toxic pesticides in and around their homes, schools, parks, and roads - a growing health risk for people and the environment. But are these poisons really necessary? This book, appealing to the hunter in us all, shows how to triumph in combat with pests without losing the war to toxic chemicals. Tiny Game Hunting, written in a lively and entertaining style and illustrated with detailed drawings, gives more than two hundred tried-and-true ways to control or kill common household and garden pests without using toxic pesticides.

Ever since men first hunted for honeycomb in rocks and daubed pictures of it on cave walls, the honeybee has been seen as one of the wonders of nature: social, industrious, beautiful, terrifying. No other creature has inspired in humans an identification so passionate, persistent, or fantastical.
"The Hive "recounts the astonishing tale of all the weird and wonderful things that humans believed about bees and their "society" over the ages. It ranges from the honey delta of ancient Egypt to the Tupelo forests of modern Florida, taking in a cast of characters including Alexander the Great and Napoleon, Sherlock Holmes and Muhammed Ali.
The history of humans and honeybees is also a history of ideas, taking us through the evolution of science, religion, and politics, and a social history that explores the bee's impact on food and human ritual.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Bee Wilson shows how humans will always view the hive as a miniature universe with order and purpose, and look to it to make sense of their own.

"The real masterwork that Sue Hubbell has created is her life," David Quammen wrote in the New York Times. This book is, like its author, a unique achievement. Weaving a vivid portrait of her own life and her bees' lives through the seasons, Hubbell writes "about bees to be sure, but also about other things: the important difference between loneliness and solitude . . . the accommodating of oneself to nature" (Philadelphia Inquirer).

Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in "The Red Hourglass, " prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home.
Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live."
Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. "The Red Hourglass" brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Dinosaurs, however toothy, did not rule the earth--and neither do humans. But what were and are the true potentates of our planet? Insects, says Scott Richard Shaw--"millions" and "millions" of insect species. Starting in the shallow oceans of ancient Earth and ending in the far reaches of outer space--where, Shaw proposes, insect-like aliens may have achieved similar preeminence--"Planet of the Bugs" spins a sweeping account of insects' evolution from humble arthropod ancestors into the bugs we know and love (or fear and hate) today.
Leaving no stone unturned, Shaw explores how evolutionary innovations such as small body size, wings, metamorphosis, and parasitic behavior have enabled insects to disperse widely, occupy increasingly narrow niches, and survive global catastrophes in their rise to dominance. Through buggy tales by turns bizarre and comical--from caddisflies that construct portable houses or weave silken aquatic nets to trap floating debris, to parasitic wasp larvae that develop in the blood of host insects and, by storing waste products in their rear ends, are able to postpone defecation until after they emerge--he not only unearths how changes in our planet's geology, flora, and fauna contributed to insects' success, but also how, in return, insects came to shape terrestrial ecosystems and amplify biodiversity. Indeed, in his visits to hyperdiverse rain forests to highlight the current insect extinction crisis, Shaw reaffirms just how crucial these tiny beings are to planetary health and human survival.
In this age of honeybee die-offs and bedbugs hitching rides in the spines of library books, "Planet of the Bugs "charms with humor, affection, and insight into the world's six-legged creatures, revealing an essential importance that resonates across time and space.

Among the largest of all insects, dragonflies and damselflies are conspicuous. Active during the day, often brightly colored, and extremely photogenic-something about their appearance and dashing flight suggests a primeval world of tree ferns and dinosaurs. The first guide of its kind, this book includes an in-depth introduction with an overview of Costa Rican biodiversity and illustrated morphological terms. The species accounts show males and females of most species, detailed illustrations and close-ups of key distinguishing features, and descriptions of habitat, behavior, and range. Dragonflies and Damselflies of Costa Rica gives readers the information they need to identify nearly every species in the country. Experienced dragonfly fans and new enthusiasts alike will find it an indispensable resource.

This is a close-up look at the world of ants. Erich Hoyt recounts observations from an ant expedition to the tropical jungle with Edward O. Wilson. He introduces ants who harvest crops, raise insects as livestock, build roads and bridges, embark on nuptial fights and go to war.

The authors describe more than 120 common varieties of southwestern insects and arthropods, enabling the reader to appreciate and respect the role "creepy crawlies" play in the world.

The number of people interested and active in keeping bees at an amateur level has continued to increase over the past few years in both rural and urban situations. This guide, aimed at beginning beekeepers, and the only one to be endorsed by the BBKA provides an authoritative text, along with clear photographs and illustrations. The book introduces the reader to beekeeping, including such areas as the workings of the colony, the structure of a hive, how to acquire bees and keep them healthy and what happens in each month in a beekeeping year. Each chapter is accompanied by anecdotes, answers to frequently asked questions and fascinating facts about bees and honey. The new edition includes new step-by-step sequences to illustrate procedures such as containing a swarm, identifying the queen, using a smoker and cleaning a hive as well as more information on different kinds of hives, disease management and many other key areas.

**SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** The Garden Jungle is a wonderful introduction to the hundreds of small creatures with whom we live cheek-by-jowl and of the myriad ways that we can encourage them to thrive. The Garden Jungle is about the wildlife that lives right under our noses, in our gardens and parks, between the gaps in the pavement, and in the soil beneath our feet. Wherever you are right now, the chances are that there are worms, woodlice, centipedes, flies, silverfish, wasps, beetles, mice, shrews and much, much more, quietly living within just a few paces of you. Dave Goulson gives us an insight into the fascinating and sometimes weird lives of these creatures, taking us burrowing into the compost heap, digging under the lawn and diving into the garden pond. He explains how our lives and ultimately the fate of humankind are inextricably intertwined with that of earwigs, bees, lacewings and hoverflies, unappreciated heroes of the natural world. The Garden Jungle is at times an immensely serious book, exploring the environmental harm inadvertently done by gardeners who buy intensively reared plants in disposable plastic pots, sprayed with pesticides and grown in peat cut from the ground. Goulson argues that gardens could become places where we can reconnect with nature and rediscover where food comes from. For anyone who has a garden, and cares about our planet, this book is essential reading.

Illustrations by Pamela Johnson

"Why is it that insects often inspire such good writing? You think of Jean Henri Fabre, William Morton Wheeler, you think of Howard Evans' Wasp Farm. To these classics we must now add The Queen Must Die, an altogether pleasing ethnography of the beehive." —Jake Page

"A very fine book indeed. . . . Longgood's Thoreauvian patience and powers of observation . . . make The Queen Must Die a special book." —James Kauffman, Christian Science Monitor

"Longgood's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. He supplies a fund of unfamiliar information about a changeless civilization buzzing about its business just outside our attention." —Walter Clemons, Newsweek

"The remarkable complex social order of bees leads the least speculative to speculate, and Longgood's speculations, leavened with quiet wit, are of a high order of stylish imagination." —Los Angeles Times

"A beautiful book about one of nature's most industrious, 'work-or-die' insects. . . . Fascinating reading." —Rocky Mountain News

Explore close-up the fascinating lives of insects.

Why do fireflies glow? How do a cricket's chirps differ from a grasshopper's? At what time of day are dragonflies most active? This information-packed guide explains the behavior of the insects around us-and raises the curtain on an exciting drama taking place before our eyes. Illustrated throughout with pen-and-ink drawings, the Stokes Guide to Observing Insect Lives tells how, where, and when to observe the most intriguing activities of more than 60 common insects in their natural habitats. The species covered range from ants, bumblebees, and silk moths to June beetles, snow fleas, and monarch butterflies.

The bright colours and fascinating ways of this small but important group of insects attract immediate attention. Cicindelidae, or tiger beetles, are frequently encountered, but they are difficult to capture, since they are alert and elusive, and still more difficult to identify. This intensive study of the distinguishing characteristics, geographical distribution and variation, and habits and habitats of tiger beetles in Canada - the culmination of the author's main interest for many years - will provide a much-needed reference work. Studies of insect families are scarce, and professional and amateur entomologists alike will find this book a most useful aid in their investigations and a stimulus to further research.

Identifying bees on the wing is known to be tricky. The Bees of North Carolina: An Identification Guide is a beginner's resource designed to help quickly and generally identify native bees in North Carolina. Developed by experts at NC State Extension, it provides an overview of some of the most common groups of bees in the state. The guide will help users learn to recognize bees according to key characteristics and, eventually, according to their overall appearance.

Ticks are among the most competent and versatile vectors of pathogens and are second to mosquitoes as vectors of a number of human pathogens. They are the most important vector of pathogens affecting cattle worldwide. Problems with tick-borne diseases were related to the introduction of improved breeds of cattle into tick-infested areas because of their greater productivity compared to well-adapted indigenous breeds. The global loss due to ticks and tick borne diseases (TTBDs) was estimated to be between $13.9 and $18.7 billion annually while in India the cost of controlling TTBDs has been estimated at $498.7 million/annum. Also, cattle infested with ticks and infected with tick-borne disease agents were moved into areas where these tick species had not previously existed. This book is written by an international collection of tick experts of prestigious organizations and covers in-depth information on different aspects of ticks i.e. biology, acaricide resistance, tick-borne diseases, tick management strategies etc. It is a valuable resource for students, academic researchers and professionals because it covers the whole range of ticks and tick-borne diseases. This handbook was assembled through the efforts of five editors and the book chapters' authors, each of whom contributed to different components of the handbook.