Here’s a little sappy gem from my bug-music collection, from none other than Burl Ives. The song is endearing enough by itself, but all the “dancing bug” footage in this 1963 Disney feature film is a swarm of silly.
http://youtu.be/qW2_xXMelR8
Mantid harmonica for the Win!
I’d love to throw an Ugly Bug Ball, though I’ve never met a bug I didn’t think was beautiful. Happy Friday! 
We frequently use insects as tools in industry, science, art and agriculture. We keep them as pets, kill them for clothes, and patent their genes. In that uncomfortable vein is a great collection of insect-related works from Sarah Garzoni. Though some of her most powerful and provocative works involve vertebrates such as upholstered pigs and shark-tooth corsets, insects get their fair share of complicated attention:
Sarah Garzoni, Nike (from Mimésis), 2002
Sarah Garzoni, Camouflage (from Mimésis), 2002
Sarah Garzoni, Cibles (from Mimésis), 2002
For Mimésis, butterfly wings were run through an ink-jet printer, than re-assembled and pinned. The art-dork in me is amused by one with this signature:
Sarah Garzoni, R. Mutt (from Mimésis), 2002
Sarah Garzoni, Rhéa, 2008
Rhéa is a beautiful melding of stick insect and plant life, held in check under a glass dome.
Sarah Garzoni, Homo-Faber, 2006
I must admit a certain jealousy to this last one, as I have sketchbooks from college of much the same thing: Swiss Army knives that sprout forth specialized insect appendages! But like any good unrealized (and perhaps somewhat simplistic) idea, I’m pleased it was actually made manifest, and with skill and humor.
Funny thing is, even though they’re in a union, they never get breaks…
In keeping with yesterday’s cicada theme, sharing a live version of one of my favorite insect-tunes: “Cicada” by the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, from Athens, GA. Though it’s kinda hard to tell in the video (heck, it’s hard to understand the lyrics in any of their songs), they’re singing all about the life cycle of the cicada!
I no longer have the CD cover to this album, and can only remember a fragment of the delightful lyrics:
Cicada wiggle worm with a mouthful of dirt/seventeen years underneath that earth/he never sees the sun/ here he comes, rebirth/ fourteen days to shed that old whiskey shirt!
Still a little sore that I’ve missed out on the gigantic cicada invasion known as Brood XIX, but not so sore that I can’t share some wonderful cicada-themed artwork by Nashville-based Anderson Design Group. I love the combinations of entomology and Tennessee humor.
“We decided to create a new line of Cicada-themed art and gifts to help folks laugh through one of Nature’s most bizarre spectacles—the emergence of Brood XIX cicadas that emerged in May and June, 2011. Since there was no way to avoid the billions of cicadas that took over our region for about 5 weeks, we decided to celebrate and do our part to help cicada lovers (and haters) to snag a keepsake as they laughed in nature’s face. “
The posters are selling out, so some of the inspired designs are all ready expired, like the cicadas themselves.
I love a good insect-snack when they’re served in edgy restaurants or entomology conferences, but these are essentially leggy window-dressing, a haute cuisine curio usually consisting of a dry-roasted cricket coated in spices daringly decorating a fancy hors d’oeuvre. Sure they’re delicious, but it is a far cry from eating that to seeing an ‘Insect Aisle’ in the local Safeway. Everybody talks about producing insects for food, but few really do anything about it. In the Netherlands at least, there are some folks who are getting really serious about feeding insects to a hungry world.
The Atlantic today has an article on Marian Peters and Arnold van Huis, who are members of VENIK, (an association of Dutch insect growers!) and part of a concerted effort in the Netherlands to figure out how to raise mealworms as food. How to best extract proteins, how to market, and even how to get goverments and consumers to recognize its legitimacy. There is a lovely podcast from Radio Netherlands where you can hear Peters talk about the promises and problems of mass-marketing mealworms, along with a slideshow of how they’re farmed.
The Atlantic article also mentions the town of Wageningen, a city so chock-full of nutrition scientists it is called “Food Valley”. In 2006 the Entomology Lab of Wageningen won an academic prize, that allowed it to throw a “City of Insects” festival! I would have loved to be there for that! Ant bands! Caterpillar floats! And lots of insect-eating! Looks like a delicious time.
Dr. Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India fed ants food-dye filled sugar water, photographing these lovely patterns of ants filling their crops (also known as “social stomachs”) with the bright colors, and making different color combinations when they change droplets.
Beautiful stuff, more info here from a (rather strangely-written) Daily Mail article. Doesn’t this make you wish you had a translucent social stomach?
Though I try to resist picking up every “collection of insect factoid” book that gets published, I couldn’t resist grabbing Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart. Unlike most factoid-books I own that celebrate the wonder and glory of invertebrates, Stewart’s book is a small collection devoted “…exclusively to the dark side of the relationship between nature and humans.” The collection contains a hit parade of all the least-loved insects, arachnids, and other arthropods that have caused humanity untold grief: Mosquitoes, bullet ants, chigoe fleas, tse-tse flies, mites, kissing bugs, and even a few that were new to me, such as the Paederus beetle and Phylloxera. Though many of the stories are tragic and gruesome, Stewart’s writing never becomes scaremongering. There is no sensationalism, and many of the entries (such as those about the brown recluse), seek to dispel myths and fears by presenting accurate information. But even in those entries Stewart manages to tell delightfully twitchy tales on how insects and arthropods truly rule the planet with an iron tarsus.
Briony Morrow-Cribbs, Brown Recluse - 2010
Briony Morrow-Cribbs, Asian Giant Hornet - 2010
Speaking of presentation, the book is gorgeous, using the same format as Wicked Plants. The Victorian-inspired cover is laced with entomological filigree, and the faux-distressed pages are filled with the beautiful etchings of Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Morrow-Cribbs also has images of her work on her site, where they made even more gorgeous with color. (I would also like to call attention to Morrow-Cribbs’ tantalizing series of books and wunderkammer– a shame the images are so small..!)
The book is great fun, but don’t give it to anybody on the fence about insects- they’ll never leave their house! 
A lovely discovery of Pennsylvania glass artist Wesley Fleming‘s incredible insects. Many of his creations are species-specific, and though there are plenty of beetles and damselflies, he’s not shy about celebrating the leggy beauty of phasmids, spiders and centipedes.
Wesley Fleming, Achrioptera fallax - 2011
Wesley Fleming, Argiope aurantia - 2010
Wesley Fleming, Mini Dichroic Jewel Beetles - 2011
A well-written but brief article in Wired on the fascinating and destructive bark and ambrosia beetles, important economic pests whose biology is little-known. The real wonder is in the accompanying photos, showing the beautiful and diverse beetles themselves, SEM photographs of the pouches they use to carry their symbiotic fungus from tree to tree, and species with males that never even grow out of the larval stage.
The effusive enthusiasm of the entomologist really comes out in this article:
On the subject of fungus, Hulcr is eloquent. “They smell like white fruit. They look like puffy clouds. Sometimes they look like brown sludge. They often taste like mushrooms. So no wonder the beetles like them,” he said. Asked whether he’d tasted the fungus himself, Hulcr said yes. “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to grow beetle symbiotic fungus on a large scale, so we could turn wood into fruit? There are so many opportunities. This is one of the most amazing systems out there. This is so cool and it’s so unexplored.”
tumbled swarm