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pretty sure that we will never be able to communicate with them, even to the limited extent we can communicate with our pets. Fanciful interpretations such as T. H. White's and Maeterlinck's aside, no one really believes we could get a sense of what a bee is feeling, if it has feelings at all. And yet although we can't talk to them, they seem to be able to talk to each other, in a way that can be said to be more sophisticated than the chirps and buzzes common throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. It is precisely this sense of them being more like us than anything else, with their elaborate houses, facial recognition, use of others' labor, and complicated symbols, and yet so impossibly different from the inside out, that keeps us hooked.

Nearly a century ago, as the Jazz Age gathered steam, Don Marquis was a writer for the Evening Sun in New York. His work encompassed many topics, but he is best remembered for creating—or at least transcribing—archy, a cockroach that wrote free verse on Marquis's typewriter by laboriously crashing his head into the keys. Archy's inability to hold down the shift key led to all of his poems being written in lower case, which added a certain insouciance to his observations. The poems were first collected in 1927 and were followed by several additional volumes, with a new trove of Marquis's work discovered in 1986. The poems proved remarkably popular, coming to include commentary by the insect's friend mehitabel, "an alley cat of questionable character," as she is described on DonMarquis.com.

Archy was generally blunt about the human condition, but he reserved some of his most trenchant observations for the role of the six-legged in the lives of the bipedal. As I have throughout this book, archy questioned the careless hubris of our assumption of superiority:

men talk of money and industry

of hard times and recoveries

of finance and economics

but the ants wait and the scorpions wait

for while men talk they are making deserts all the time

getting the world ready for the conquering ant

drought and erosion and desert

because men cannot learn

The descendents of archy and his kind no longer seem to be leaving us missives, which seems rather a shame. Perhaps our modern keyboards seem daunting, with their need to be connected to vast processors that are inaccessible to a mere cockroach lacking both strength to turn the switch as well as a password. I would give a great deal to come into my office one day and find something like this, one of archy's best, on my monitor:

i do not see why men

should be so proud

insects have the more

ancient lineage

according to the scientists

insects were insects

when man was only

a burbling whatisit

One can only hope that perhaps one day soon our modern cockroaches will learn to manipulate a touchpad.

Acknowledgments

My first thanks are owed to Bill Cade, orthopterist extraordinaire, who in addition to providing much help with my own cricket research over the years is the originator of the title Sex on Six Legs. He graciously allowed me to use it, though I am sure that his interpretation of the topic would have been at least as compelling. Other colleagues were generous with their unpublished data or manuscripts, anecdotes, and careful reading of several of the chapters: particular thanks to Nathan Bailey, Dave Featherstone, Ryan Gregory, Joan Herbers, and Kirk Visscher. Kirk has always been a great source of bee lore and other social insect information, not to mention supplying us with honey and helping us get rid of our personal swarm. Leigh Simmons has continued to be a great collaborator and colleague. Much of my love of insects as study organisms came from Adrian Wenner, who also taught me a great deal about the practice of science and its potential pitfalls. My Ph.D. advisor, the late W. D. Hamilton, was a key influence in my thinking about evolutionary biology, as well as a source of appreciation for the wonders of insect natural history. My students, graduate and undergraduate, always provide interesting comments and acted as