Jake's Bug Collection

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JAKE'S BUG COLLECTION

30 BUGS AND COUNTING!!!
*** I caught a LUNA MOTH on August 14 it is the best one *** NEW: Science Fair plan is at the bottom *** Dad says do NOT touch the killing jar ***

HI!! My name is Jake and I am 9 years old and I am in 4th grade. This is my page about my bug collection. Me and my dad started it last summer (1998) when I found a dead cicada on the driveway and wanted to keep it. Now I have 30 bugs pinned in two cigar boxes and a glass case Dad made. My goal is 50 bugs by next summer.

Dad typed some of this because I type slow. The parts in the blue boxes are DAD'S NOTES. He says they are the important safety parts. OK Dad.

The best bug I have is a LUNA MOTH. It is light green and as big as my hand (almost). Scroll down to see my list.

How to Catch Bugs

What you need:

A net. Mine is a butterfly net from the hobby store. Dad fixed the handle with duct tape when I broke it on the fence. Swing it sideways not down, and then flip the net over so the bug is trapped in the bottom.
Jars with holes in the lid. Baby food jars are good for beetles. A peanut butter jar is good for a mantis. Dad pokes the holes with a nail.
A flashlight. Lots of bugs come out at night. Moths come to the porch light. That is where I got the luna moth.
A white sheet. If you hang a white sheet by a light at night the bugs land on it and you can just pick them off. This is how we are doing my science fair project too.
Patience. Dad says this is the main thing. Dragonflies are SO FAST. I missed like 20 before I got one.

Where to look: Under rocks and logs (put them back!). On milkweed plants (monarchs and milkweed bugs). In the tall grass by the creek (grasshoppers and katydids). On the screen door (June bugs). Under the porch light (moths). On the bark of the big oak (cicadas, but you mostly just find their shells, which are called exuviae, Dad looked it up).

DAD'S NOTE: Jake does not catch bees, wasps, or hornets, and neither should you. We look at them and let them be. He has learned the hard way what a yellowjacket can do. We also leave honeybees alone because they are working. Same goes for anything you can't identify that looks like it could sting. There are plenty of bugs that don't.

The Killing Jar (Dad's Department)

To pin a bug it has to be dead. Some of my bugs I found already dead (the first cicada, a June bug on the windowsill, the swallowtail that hit the car). The rest go in the killing jar. I am not allowed to touch it. Dad does that part.

Some kids put the jar in the freezer instead. We do that for the beetles because Dad says it is easier and Mom doesn't mind as long as it is in a bag and labeled BUGS.

DAD'S NOTE: Our killing jar is a wide-mouth jar with a layer of plaster of Paris set in the bottom. I put a few drops of ethyl acetate (the stuff in the "non-acetone" kind of nail polish remover; it's also sold at the hobby shop) on the plaster, close the lid, and the fumes do the job in a few minutes. The jar stays on a high shelf in the garage, the lid stays on, and a nine-year-old does not handle it, period. The freezer method (a sealed baggie, overnight) is perfectly fine and safer if you don't want chemicals around. Either way, the insect should be pinned soon after, while it's still soft. If one dries out stiff, you can soften it again by leaving it a day or two in a "relaxing jar" (a sealed container with a damp paper towel in the bottom, and the bug on a piece of cardboard so it doesn't sit in water).

Pinning and Labels

You need REAL insect pins, not sewing pins. Sewing pins are too fat and they rust. Insect pins are long and skinny and black. We use size 2 and size 3. The hobby store had them.

Where the pin goes:

Beetles: through the RIGHT wing cover (the hard shell wing), near the front. Not the middle, because then the pin goes through the place where the legs attach and they fall off. (I found this out.)
Butterflies and moths: right through the middle of the thorax (the middle body part where the wings are). Then you put them on the spreading board and hold the wings flat with strips of paper and more pins for about a week until they dry that way. Dad made our spreading board out of foam board and it has a groove down the middle for the body.
Grasshoppers, cicadas, mantises: through the thorax, a little to the right of the middle.
Really little bugs: you glue them to a tiny paper triangle (a "point") and pin the paper. I have not done this yet. My bugs are big.

Leave about a quarter inch of pin sticking up above the bug so you can pick it up without touching the bug. NEVER touch the bug. Wings crumble.

Labels: Every bug gets a tiny label on the pin under it. It says WHERE, WHEN, and WHO. Like this:

OHIO: our backyard
14 Aug 1999
J. & R. (Jake and Dad)

Dad prints the labels really small on the computer and we cut them out. He says a bug without a label is "just a dead bug" and a bug WITH a label is "a specimen." A specimen is worth more.

Then the bugs go in a box with a foam bottom, and Dad puts a mothball in the corner so OTHER bugs don't eat MY bugs. (There is a tiny beetle called a dermestid beetle that eats bug collections. That would be the worst thing ever.)

MY 30 BUGS!!!
(** = my favorites)

#	Bug	Kind	Where / notes
1	Dog-day cicada	true bug relatives (Homoptera)	Driveway, July 1998. My FIRST bug. They are called dog-day because they buzz in the hottest part of summer (the "dog days"). These come every year. The 17-year ones are different.
2	Monarch **	butterfly	Milkweed patch by the creek. Orange and black. They fly all the way to Mexico for the winter!
3	Viceroy	butterfly	Looks almost the same as a monarch but has an extra black line across the back wings. I thought it was a monarch. Dad checked the book.
4	Eastern tiger swallowtail **	butterfly	Yellow with black stripes like a tiger and little tails on the back wings. Found it dead on the car grill. Wing tip is a little broken.
5	Black swallowtail	butterfly	Mom's parsley. The caterpillars eat parsley and dill and carrots. Mom was not happy but she let me have one.
6	Cabbage white	butterfly	Everywhere. Easiest butterfly to catch. Small and white with black dots.
7	Mourning cloak	butterfly	Dark brown with a yellow edge and blue spots. April! Dad says they sleep all winter as grown-ups so they are the first ones out in spring.
8	LUNA MOTH **	moth	Porch light, August 14, 1999, 10:30 at night (I got to stay up). Pale green, long tails, eye spots. Grown-up luna moths don't even have a real mouth, they don't eat, they only live about a week. THE BEST BUG.
9	Polyphemus moth	moth	Big brown moth with a big eye spot on each back wing. Also the porch light. Same family as the luna (giant silk moths).
10	Isabella tiger moth	moth	This is what a woolly bear caterpillar turns into! Orange-yellow. Porch light.
11	Praying mantis **	mantis	Big green one on the tomato cage, September 1999. Dad says it is probably a Chinese mantis because it is so big. The girl mantis sometimes eats the boy mantis. Gross.
12	Walkingstick	stick insect	Looks EXACTLY like a stick. My cousin found it on the picnic table and thought it was a stick. It is hard to pin because it is so skinny.
13	Differential grasshopper	grasshopper	Tall grass by the creek. Big and yellowish with black chevrons (that is like sideways V's) on the back legs.
14	Field cricket	cricket	Black. Under the garage mat. Only the boys chirp. They rub their wings together, not their legs.
15	Katydid	katydid	Green and looks like a leaf. Really long antennas, way longer than a grasshopper's. That's how you tell.
16	Common green darner	dragonfly	FINALLY. Took me all of July. Green body, blue tail (if it's a boy). Dragonflies hold their wings out flat.
17	Damselfly (bluet)	damselfly	Like a skinny little dragonfly but it folds its wings back over its body when it lands. Bright blue.
18	Mayfly	mayfly	Off the gas station window. Three long tails. Dad says grown-ups only live a day or two.
19	Japanese beetle	beetle	Shiny green and copper. There were like a million on Mom's roses. Mom said take as many as you want.
20	June bug (June beetle)	beetle	Brown, kind of clumsy, bangs into the screen door at night. Found dead on the windowsill.
21	Firefly (lightning bug)	beetle	It is a BEETLE not a fly! It doesn't glow after it's dead which is kind of sad. I mostly just catch these and let them go.
22	Ladybug (lady beetle)	beetle	Also a beetle. Mine is orange with lots of spots. The really tiny ones are hard to pin so this one is glued on a point (see, I did do one).
23	Stag beetle **	beetle	Big pinchers like antlers! Under a rotten log in the woods. The boys have the big jaws. It pinched Dad. Ha ha.
24	Eyed click beetle	beetle	Two big fake eye spots on its back. If you put it upside down it goes CLICK and flips over. We let it do that about 10 times first.
25	Large milkweed bug	true bug	Orange and black, on the milkweed with the monarchs. Dad says a "true bug" has a beak it pokes into stuff to suck. Only these ones are REALLY called bugs. But I call everything bugs.
26	Boxelder bug	true bug	Black with red lines. Hundreds on the sunny side of the house in fall.
27	Stink bug	true bug	Shaped like a shield. It really does stink. Don't squish it.
28	Water strider	true bug	Walks on top of the water in the creek! Its feet have little hairs so it doesn't sink.
29	Giant water bug **	true bug	HUGE, brown, flat. Came to the light at the gas station. Dad says they are called "toe-biters" and he picked it up with tongs.
30	Carpenter ant (queen)	ant	A big black ant with WINGS. Queens have wings when they fly away to start a new nest. Then the wings fall off. Mine still has them.

Bugs I want next: a cecropia moth (the BIGGEST moth around here), a rhinoceros beetle, a tiger beetle (they run super fast), a hummingbird moth, and a 17-year cicada (but Dad says those won't come back here for a long time so I have to wait).

Bugs That Are NOT Insects

My teacher says this is the most important thing I know, so here it is. An INSECT has:

6 legs (always!)
3 body parts: head, thorax, abdomen
2 antennas (the real word is antennae)
usually wings (but not always, like ants that are workers)

So these things are NOT insects even though people call them bugs:

Spiders have 8 legs and 2 body parts and no antennas. They are arachnids. Also ticks, daddy longlegs and scorpions are arachnids. I have a wolf spider in a jar of rubbing alcohol (that is how you keep spiders, you can't pin them, they shrivel up). Dad did the alcohol.
Roly-polies (pill bugs) have like 14 legs and they are actually crustaceans! They are related to crabs and shrimp. Land shrimp. Weird.
Centipedes and millipedes have WAY too many legs. Centipedes have one pair of legs on each body segment and millipedes have two pairs. Centipedes can bite, so no.
Worms are not insects. They aren't even arthropods. They are just worms.

So if you count legs and get 8, it's a spider. If you get 6, it's an insect. If you lose count, it's a millipede.

My Science Fair Plan

The science fair is in March 2000. My question is: "Which color of light do night bugs like best?"

How I will do it: Dad got 4 light bulbs: regular white, yellow (a "bug light"), red, and blue. Every clear night for 2 weeks (in the spring when the bugs come back) we hang the white sheet and put ONE bulb in front of it for exactly 30 minutes, and I count every bug that lands on the sheet. Then the next night, the next color. Dad is helping me make a chart on the computer.

My guess (hypothesis): White will win and yellow will get the least, because the bug light package says bugs can't see yellow as well. But we will see!!

The bugs get counted and let go, except if one is really good and I don't have it. Then it is a specimen. (Just kidding, Dad says we have to keep the experiment fair and separate from the collection. Fine.)

DAD'S NOTE: To keep it honest we're going to run each color more than one night and mix up the order, so a warm night doesn't make one color look better than it is. Jake groaned when I explained this. He'll thank me when the judges ask about it.

You are visitor number

(that's a lot of bugs)

Send me a message if you have a bug collection too! Dad reads the mail first.
[email protected]

Other pages I like: Tyler's Dragon's Den (he's in my class) · Monarch Waystation (monarchs!) · Science at Home · back to EnchantedForest

Last updated: September 19, 1999 (added the mantis, #11, and the science fair part).
© 1999 Jake and his Dad. Please don't copy my bug list, go catch your own!