Bug Collecting Is Not for Sissies

Sissies don't like insects. They especially don't like June bugs that bumble and scrabble around lights in the early summer. When I was about 10 years old, I didn't want to be a sissy, so I decided to LIKE June bugs. Come evening, I'd get hold of a bug by his middle and hold him up so his legs were working in mid air, or I'd let his pincer pinch my finger and he'd be stranded there. In case no one ever told you, June bugs are very stupid. Like the proverbial teen-aged boys, they only think of one thing. I wasn't what the beetles were looking for, so they caused me no harm. [When I went looking for an image of a June bug, I discovered that the beetle with the pincers was a stag beetle. Wicked looking beast, isn't it?]

Getting acquainted with June bugs led to my bug collection. Somewhere I must have seen how real etymologists mount their collections, and I got together some sort of frame with a glass and some cotton to pin the dead bugs to. It was pretty interesting, until nature took it's course. No one told me that dead things, no matter their size, are prey to smaller things. When all those little, icky white worms appeared, I suddenly lost interest in that hobby and the whole kit and kaboodle went into the trash.

I still like bugs, but I now insist that most of them stay outside my house.

I have watched for hours as an ant carried a bit of potato chip from my patio toward his hole. So far I have never had enough patience to follow an ant all the way home though, but I'm young enough that I might manage it some day. I taught all my kids to enjoy pill-bugs that roll up into a nice little gray ball when you disturb them. And I got my husband and brother-in-law to watching the paper wasps as they came to my flower bed, gathered up a ball of mud and flew off. After awhile they had the wasps named. There was the efficient one, and the workmanlike one, and the idiot one who never seemed to get a decent ball of mud collected. Wasps are interesting to watch...as long as you stay far enough away from them.

Now, I'm not a sissy, but I do have to admit that two kinds of bugs send chills up my spine: centipedes and earwigs. Just thinking of them makes me cringe. And you can't kill a centipede with your garden trowel,  because if you hack it in two, it just grows a new whatever-you-cut-off. I wonder if scientists have studied this trait to see if it could help in regrowing limbs or fingers or nerves.

Spiders aren't bugs, but for all intents and purposes they might as well be. I can't say that I want a spider crawling around on me, and I give them plenty of space, but I don't let anyone kill the spider by the back door that kills untold hundreds of bugs and leaves their carcasses for me to clean up.

One summer I had a jumping spider as a pet in the window over my kitchen sink. I had noticed that there weren't any fruit flies around the ripening tomatoes that I set there. Then one day as I was doing dishes, I saw the little striped guy come out of the corner, whirl around until he sighted in on a fruit fly, and with a mighty leap, jump and catch the fly. After that experience, I have treasured jumping spiders and have passed the tolerance on to my children. There was a dime-sized one in the sunroom last fall. I hope he is just hibernating and will be back when the weather warms up.

And everyone has marveled at the web of the orb-web spider, like Charlotte. The precision engineering that goes on within that little creature that allows her to construct her web is truly astounding.

One of our kids had a pet praying mantis one summer. We named him Manfred and kept him in an aquarium with a glass lid. I never realized how hard it was to stun a fly instead of killing it until I tried to get living flies for Manfred to eat.

I can never tell the story of Noah and the Ark without wondering why he let two mosquitoes on the boat. ...or two fleas....or two flies. I suppose they serve a good purpose, but I'm glad no child has ever asked me that question.

As a hobby, bug collecting has been interesting and informative and harmless. But I must admit that it's much better to collect them by picture and memory than by mounting them in cases. And now adays I am much more of a sissy than I was at 10.