The Beetle Story

*Day 292*

So, I go to work today and Lynn tells me about her night.  Jessica woke up about 3:00 screaming.  Lynn is trying to get her calmed down enough to find out what is wrong.  She said she sounded stuffed up so she thought she probably wasn't feeling good.  Jessica finally calmed down a little bit, and let Lynn know that her throat was hurting.  Lynn asked her if she wanted a drink.  Jessica said yes.  Lynn took her into the kitchen and grabbed a cup of water off the counter and gave it to Jessica.  Then Jessica started screaming that the beetle was going to get her.  Lynn was frustrated that she was no longer calm, and couldn't understand what was wrong.  Until she took the cup from Jessica and saw this.....

Then, Lynn screamed and threw the cup.  And I'm sure she did a scaredy dance that blew mine out of the water.   Well, that put my spider story to shame.

This bug was actually brought into their house on purpose.  We have a bug collection for preschool that we have been working on for a few years.  We have some pretty cool bugs.  Two or three weeks ago, Darrell brought this water beetle home from work with him.  We thought it was cool enough to keep for our collection.  (Really the bugs in our collection are dead.)  Darrell called his friend who is an entomologist (studies insects) to find out more about this beetle.  His friend told him that they like grasshoppers.  But it probably wouldn't eat while in captivity because it's more worried about being trapped.  We wanted to see it eat, and there are an abundance of grasshoppers right now.  Darrell decided to let it live in the fish aquarium.  They've tried to feed it grasshoppers in there.  It hasn't seemed interested.  (By the way, did you know grasshoppers can swim.)  So it stayed in the aquarium until last night when it climbed into the cup on the counter.  Thankfully, it's almost ready for our bug collection.  When I took this picture, I thought it was dead.  Then, it's legs moved.  I refrained form throwing the cup, but it was hard.  This guy gives me the creeps.  I'm looking for a volunteer to pin him into my bug collection.  Any takers?