Imagine living in a library full time. Your life is simple: You hunt at night, lying in wait for your dinner to sidle within range of your toxic pincers, then grabbing it, liquifying it. During the day, you hide in dusty corners, narrow crevices, or in the pages of a scintillating novel, something like D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (which is drop-dead dull), or Dicken’s “Great Expectations,” which is at least long enough — and old enough — to fatten your favorite prey.
Because you are petite and prone to desiccation, you seek shelter in your favorite volumes, which are humid enough to keep you hydrated, yet tight enough to protect you from hungry spiders. If you run out of meals or moisture, you grab the passing leg of a beetle with your pincers and hitch a ride to a different shelf — perhaps in the poetry section, or biography.
When the time is right, you secrete silk from the glands in your jaws to spin a compact waterproof pouch for brood rearing. After mating, you wear the brood pouch attached to your abdomen, and feed your young with a rich, milky secretion from your ovaries. After their first molt, your offspring ride around with you until they feel ready to venture forth and find their own favorite volumes.
Because so many people, especially beekeepers, use the word “pseudoscorpion” as a synonym for “book scorpion,” I want to explain the difference and advocate for a better name. I will start by defining pseudoscorpions, book scorpions, chelifers, and the chelifer’s favorite food: book lice.
What is a pseudoscorpion?
First, the tedious part. These animals belong to the order Pseudoscorpiones, included in the class Arachnida, which contains spiders, plus kin. But because the prefix “pseudo” means false, we know they are not true scorpions. For one thing, pseudoscorpions have no tail or stinger, which makes them easy to spot and painless to handle.
Overall, the 4000 species of pseudoscorpions are small predators that live in soil or decomposing matter where they feed on tiny insects and spiders. Having eclectic tastes, they also prey on clothes moths, carpet beetles, silverfish, dust mites, book lice, and small flies found inside homes and storage areas. Of interest to beekeepers, some species also enjoy meals of wax moth larvae, small hive beetles, and varroa mites.
In place of the missing stinger, pseudoscorpions have a pair of venom-producing pincers (pedipalps) used to immobilize their prey, so it doesn’t squirm and wriggle while they eat. To make dining even more pleasurable, they squirt digestive juices inside the exoskeleton to liquify their meal, allowing them to slurp and sup with-out distraction …
