bug-house

[bug-house]

Towards the end of my high school Biology class, we all went outside at our teacher’s instruction. He had us pair up, and passed out airtight glass jars with cotton balls inside to each group. My partner, a faceless acquaintance whose name I don’t recall, sat impatiently as our instructor explained how we would use bug nets to catch “specimens” and seal them in our jars. The cotton balls had absorbed a noxious chemical, and any bugs trapped inside would die within seven seconds. We were told to wait until it stopped moving.

My partner was more than happy to take on the role of bug-catcher while I took notes about our finds on a worksheet. I watched as she fruitlessly smacked her net around skittish dragonflies, always a little too late. Around us, our fellow students cheered at every capture, watching with fascination as the bugs writhed at the bottom of their jars, suffocating.

Eventually my partner snagged a grasshopper in her net, whooping and jogging back towards me. I opened our jar when she showed me her captive, and she kept the net over the top until the grasshopper fell inside. She quickly closed the jar behind it, and we watched with very different expressions as it scrambled to escape. Before the seven seconds was up, I turned away to write “grasshopper” on our worksheet. The strokes were slow and deliberate; by the time I was done, so was the grasshopper.

By our next class, every student’s bugs were pinned to large pieces of Styrofoam, including those from other classes. What I remember most are the butterflies. They took up the most space, and they were the most irresponsibly pinned. Some were left with tears and holes in their wings, others were pinned through their heads when someone somehow missed their midsections. Most of them were missing legs or antennae.

Everyone pointed out their catches to their friends excitedly, but I couldn’t pick my partner’s grasshopper out of the crowd of insects. Instead, I surveyed everyone else’s finds, all frozen with legs tucked under them. After all this, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the only thing we’d learned how to do was gas bugs in jars.

[bug-house]

A few weeks ago, my roommate called for me as soon as she entered our apartment.

“Come downstairs! There’s a huge moth outside!”

When we got out there, we saw a beautiful brown-and-white striped moth lying still on the ground. It was a lot bigger that the moths we usually see around the city, and it seemed out of place on the concrete below our back door.

“Is it dead?” I asked.

“Nah, look.” She poked the moth’s left wing gently, and it stepped away slowly, as though we woke it up from a nap. She scooped it up and handed it over to me when I put out my palms. It vibrated its’ wings and body violently, leaving a buzzing sensation on my fingers.

“His wings are pretty messed up,” she explained, “He’s either trying to threaten you, or he can’t fly.” I stared at the flittering creature in my hand for a few seconds before looking at my roommate with pleading eyes. She grinned and looked at the moth once more before finally asking: “Wanna keep him?”

We prepared a glass fish-shaped container for our new friend and looked up all the information we could about him. He was a Rustic Sphinx moth- a type of hawk moth who eats from tube-shaped flowers. Like all moths, this one was nocturnal, and he rested on my hand as my roommate finished arranging his new home on the windowsill. I must have been a little too excited, because I dropped him on the way to put him inside the glass. I looked on in horror as fluttered fruitlessly to the ground, finally landing unceremoniously on the hardwood floor.

“Oh, geez!” I scrambled to pick him back up as my roommate berated me.

“You had one job! Ah well, now we know he really can’t fly.”

“We should try to find some plants for him. Petunias or something.”

“Yeah, I saw some by that cookie place. Insomnia. We can go there later.”

By the end of the day, we’d named the moth Tesla (after the inventor) and decided to go looking for plants to leave him with the next day.

I scooped Tesla into a small jar, keeping the top open in case he somehow could manage to fly away after all. I grabbed my keys, phone, and sketchbook before making my way to one of the buildings on our college campus. I’d noticed some white petunias in stone pots in front of this building on my way back from class. They would be perfect for Tesla.

I texted Amber to let her know I was releasing him, and she texted back her goodbyes. When Tesla and I finally reached the stone pots, I dumped him carefully onto my palm once again. He fluttered uncomfortably for a moment, dusting my fingers with tiny scales, before righting himself and settling down. We sat like this for a moment as I was sad to see him go, but eventually, I nudged him to the soil of the nearest pot. He clung to my hand in protest, and I had to nudge him off with my pen. He eventually got comfortable in the dirt and laid just as still as when we first found him. I took a few photos to remember him by, and sat drawing him for another half hour. He was the perfect model: perfectly still. Before long, I had another class to go to, so I left him among the petunias, hoping he was well enough to drink from them.

[bug-house]

During my second fall semester, I took only took one lecture class. One day, I watched a little black bug crawl onto my tiny pull-out desk out of nowhere. Despite having perfectly functional wings, it stuck to crawling around on my paper. I rotated it around so it was going nowhere, but it didn’t seem to catch on. I took a few pictures and played with it until class was nearly over, when it finally flew away.

In my next class, I was tasked with making an ink drawing with my choice of subject matter. So, I used my photos as reference (and more from Google Images after researching his species: Boxelders) and depicted my new friend with dedicated detail. I hung his portrait above my desk as a fond memory.

[bug-house]

The last year I occupied a dorm room, I woke up one spring day with half a dozen swollen bites on my arms and legs. They were the itchiest bites I’d ever received, and they were pure torture for the week it took me to make it to the student health clinic. Luckily, I was the only one in the suite to be affected. In that time, I researched dorm room pests, landing on bed bugs as the most likely suspects.

I learned that bedbugs are the most considerate parasites on the planet; they numb the bite area with painkilling chemicals before digging in, they only feed every 5-10 days, and they don’t carry any diseases. The worst the bedbugs did to me was leave me with a slight allergic reaction and a little less blood.

When I finally showed the doctors my bites, they told me to buy anti-itch cream and enlist the services of an exterminator. I complied at the insistence of my roommate and parents. A few days later, my suite-mates and I were told to remove any electronics and valuables from our dorm for 6 hours while the exterminators killed the bedbugs with extreme heat. I told anyone who asked that bedbugs aren’t that bad, really.

[bug-house]

I whimpered quietly one winter night as I watched the scariest bug I’d ever seen. The whimper became a squeal when it scrambled closer to my bed on what looked like hundreds of legs. I had to calm down: my roommate was asleep across the room, and I didn’t want to wake her up. She would be even more terrified than I was, and would insist I kill it. 

I kept an extremely watchful eye on the many-legged terror as I took a picture of it for later research material, then gathered bug-catching supplies: a plastic cup with a wide rim and a stiff piece of cardstock. I moved across the room at breakneck speed as I clapped the cup on the wall, always just behind it. When it finally stopped, I took the opportunity to make my capture. I sucked air through my teeth in sympathy when I noticed I had accidentally cut off a few legs with the cup’s rim. They stayed stuck to the wall when I slid the cardstock under the cup and jogged to the back door to let the creepy-crawly out.

After it was all over, I posted my photo to Instagram. One of my friends must’ve had a run-in with this bug before because she responded: “It’s called a house centipede! They are the nicest bugs ever!!” After looking up the house centipede myself, I learned she was right. House centipedes hunt pests like bedbugs, cockroaches, silverfish, and termites. They like warm, humid areas, and tend to enter homes during the winter to survive the cold. These guys definitely look horrific, but they were the lesser evil. After learning all of that, I almost wished I’d let the thing stick around. Almost.

[bug-house]

I watched a small insect, most likely an ant, crawl across the drawing table where my professor was demonstrating the correct use of alcoholic markers. It scrambled over paint stains and copier paper before my professor - suddenly and without warning - smashed the bug with his bare index finger. Other students jumped, I winced, and the professor continued his lecture.

[bug-house]

Quick About

I’m starting this blog to keep track of my bug encounters. I think insects are really cool in general, and I want to share what I find. To start out with, I’m going to be queuing up some short passages from an essay I wrote about various bugs I’ve met. Enjoy!