The clever author of the acclaimed Ninety-Nine Gnats, Nits, and Nibblers offers a companion volume that runs the gamut from the regrettably familiar, including ticks, cockroaches, and mosquitoes, to bizarre and obscure creatures such as sheep keds, mantispids, and reindeer throat bobs.

Describes the characteristics, life cycle, behavior, and survival skills of various insects, including fleas, earwigs, and ladybugs.

Insects covered include cockroaches, fruit flies, house flies, mealworms, silverfish, carpenter ants, centipedes, clothes moths, earwigs, termites, junebugs, grasshoppers, monarch and victory butterflies, praying mantis, gypsy moths, antlions, crickets, fireflies, katydids, yellowjackets, dragonflies, damselflies, mayflies, ear mites, fleas, ticks, bedbugs, black widow spiders, lice, chiggers, mosquitoes, scabies.

A comprehensive examination of American women scientists across the sciences throughout the 20th century, providing a rich historical context for understanding their achievements and the way they changed the practice of science. Much more than a "Who's Who," this exhaustive two-volume encyclopedia examines the significant achievements of 20th century American women across the sciences in light of the historical and cultural factors that affected their education, employment, and research opportunities. With coverage that includes a number of scientists working today, the encyclopedia shows just how much the sciences have evolved as a professional option for women, from the dawn of the 20th century to the present. American Women of Science since 1900 focuses on 500 of the 20th century's most notable American women scientists—many overlooked, undervalued, or simply not well known. In addition, it offers individual features on 50 different scientific disciplines (Women in Astronomy, etc.), as well as essays on balancing career and family, girls and science education, and other sociocultural topics. Readers will encounter some extraordinary scientific minds at work, getting a sense of the obstacles they faced as the scientific community faced the questions of feminism and gender confronting the nation as a whole.

Honey, I'm Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World showcases a wealth of recipes for cookies, breads, pies, puddings, and cakes that feature honey as an essential ingredient. Noted entomologist May Berenbaum also details the fascinating history of honey harvesting and consumption around the world, explains the honey bee's extraordinary capacity to process nectar into concentrated sweetness, and marvels at honey's diverse flavors and health benefits. Honey is a unique food because of its power to evoke a particular time and place. Every time it is collected from a hive, honey takes on the nuanced flavors of a particular set of flowers--clover, orange blossoms, buckwheat, or others--at a certain point in time processed and stored by a particular group of bees. Honey is not just a snapshot of a time and place--it's the taste of a time and place, and it lends its flavors to the delectable baked goods and other treats found here. More than a cookbook, Honey, I'm Homemade is a tribute to the remarkable work of Apis mellifera, the humble honey bee whose pollination services allow three-quarters of all flowering plant species to reproduce and flourish. Sales of the book will benefit the University of Illinois Pollinatarium--the first freestanding science outreach center in the nation devoted to flowering plants and their pollinators. Because so much depends on honey bees, and because people have benefited from their labors for millennia, Honey, I'm Homemade is the perfect way to share and celebrate honey's sweetness and delight.

Many gardeners can supply a significant amount of their own food during the plentiful summer harvest. But the key to substantial savings on your food bill is putting fresh, homegrown produce on your table every month of the year. And in the mild, forgiving climate of the maritime Pacific Northwest, it can be easier than you might think. In Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest, Binda Colebrook provides a complete guide to cool-season crops and how to raise them. Gardeners from Southeastern Alaska to southern Oregon will benefit from her clear, practical advice on: Selecting and preparing the ideal winter gardening site Maximizing production and minimizing pests with cloches, cold frames, mulches and companion planting Choosing the best strains and hardiest varieties for a year-round growing season. An excellent companion volume to The Winter Harvest Cookbook, this revised and updated edition of the classic text will have you serving up fabulous alternatives to bland, expensive and tasteless imported supermarket vegetables in no time. Whether your favorite meals include hearty roots or succulent greens, Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest will help you maximize your food production year-round.

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

In Only the Lonely (1991), Ally Sheedy appeases prospective mother-in-law Maureen O'Hara by going along to see the 1939 film How Green Was My Valley--starring Maureen O'Hara. Richard LaGravenese, slighted by critic Gene Siskel over his screenplay for The Fisher King (1991) wrote an unsavory character named Siskel into The Ref (1994). Movies and television shows often feature inside jokes. Sometimes there are characters named after crew members. Directors are often featured in cameo appearances--Alfred Hitchcock's silhouette can be seen in Family Plot (1976), for example. This work catalogs such occurrences. Each entry includes the title of the film or show, year of release, and a full description of the in-joke.

Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars disguising themselves as flowers by fastening petals to their bodies; termites emitting a viscous glue to rally fellow soldiers--and you will have entered an insect world once beyond imagining, a world observed and described down to its tiniest astonishing detail by Thomas Eisner. The story of a lifetime of such minute explorations, For Love of Insects celebrates the small creatures that have emerged triumphant on the planet, the beneficiaries of extraordinary evolutionary inventiveness and unparalleled reproductive capacity. To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings, Eisner tells us, but never has a reckoning been such a pleasure. Recounting exploits and discoveries in his lab at Cornell and in the field in Uruguay, Australia, Panama, Europe, and North America, Eisner time and again demonstrates how inquiry into the survival strategies of an insect leads to clarifications beyond the expected; insects are revealed as masters of achievement, forms of life worthy of study and respect from even the most recalcitrant entomophobe. Filled with descriptions of his ingenious experiments and illustrated with photographs unmatched for their combination of scientific content and delicate beauty, Eisner's book makes readers participants in the grand adventure of discovery on a scale infinitesimally small, and infinitely surprising.