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"Love is not consolation.  It is light."  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Adult fireflies come out during the summer months and devote every night of their short adult lives to courtship. Males will take flight and emit flashes that vary species to species with respect to color, rate, length, and intensity of light pulse. The number of flashes and the duration of the flashes, as well as the female’s response, are important in recognizing mates. Females usually have short wings or are entirely wingless and fly very little, if at all. They will usually sit perched on plants, such as the common blue violet and trillium, or grass and respond to the males from there.

 Some species of firefly glow instead of flash while there are other species that come out during the day, in which they do not use flashes or glow to attract mates. They use pheromones instead.

The female will lay her eggs in moist soil, a dead log, or moss. The dead log could have originated from trees like the silver maple, cottonwood tree, and the sugar maple. After about two weeks, the eggs hatch and larvae emerge. The larvae as well as wingless females are referred to as glowworms. The larvae are flattened with 10 segmented abdomen.. The head is small, usually retracted, with curved mandibles. In the northern U.S. fireflies can spend one to three years in their larval stage, but further south they can complete their development in a few months. They hibernate as larvae in chambers formed of soil on or under the ground. The larvae pupate in the late spring underground in cells made of soil and emerge a few weeks later as adults.

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