Where There are Flowers There are Insects

Where There are Flowers There are Insects

     There is a lack of insects in our Nature Notebooks. Yet, here is a bee on Sophia’s page.

     It is the flowers that get the most attention. But where there are flowers there are insects.

     Weeding the winter cress out of the front garden I saw that our crocuses were populated with bees when their petals were open to the afternoon sun. I decided it would be wise to weed when the garden was shaded and the petals less populated. 
  

     
     Entomology is a subject in which I have a bias - a bias born of cowardice. I prefer the “nice” insects. It is the nice ones that appear in our Nature Notebooks: the bumblebees, honeybees, ants, butterflies and ladybugs. Perhaps we can call them the storybook insects, along with crickets and fireflies. Of these, as well as the less tolerable bugs, my children became familiar. I managed somehow to keep my bias to myself.

     
     While inspecting our newly blossoming daffodils, the tree stump brought back a memory. In my girlhood I remember sitting on the edge of a rotting tree stump in my neighbor’s front yard waiting for her to come out to play. As I waited I gazed into the rotted hole in the middle of the tree stump. It was filled with rainwater. I had excellent eyesight as a child and was startled to see what was taking place in the hole. Little hairy, wiggly worm-like creatures jerked and flitted about in the water. “These must be wigglers,” I thought. In grammar school we drew the life cycle of the mosquito in class. I had never seen a “wiggler” - larva stage - before, but I did now. Bitten enough times by the adult fly I was curious. But I was also creeped-out. I never sat upon that tree stump again.

     My children and I began our study of insects, along with a selection of other living creatures, with Christian Liberty Nature Reader Book 3 and Book 4 (3^rd and 4^th grade). These reprinted Readers were originally meant for children to read themselves, but I recognized the writing style to be the kind that lends itself to enjoyable, attentive listening and thus a narration, too. Therefore I read them aloud. The science facts are presented in a “child-friendly” way. It takes some talent to do this. Not every writer has this natural ability that seems to come to those who have a sensitive regard for children.

  

     The pen drawings in these age-old Readers are accurate but inadequate at standing on their own. Photographs and modern books can stand in.

     The title 1001Bugs to Spot, sounds ambitious but its colorful array of creepy crawlies are divided into an array of habitats, including that of the garden shed. (Do you know what’s in there?) Children will enjoy searching for, and pointing out, the living things on the pages – one day – one habitat - at a time.

     You might like the gentle introduction to insects in the wispy watercolor drawings of Charlotte Voake in, Insect Detective by Steve Voake. Reading this book aloud would help a home teacher like me keep her bias under cover.  

     And yet book-knowledge has only one part to play. The living things on the pages of the Nature Readers, for instance, are what an American child would be likely to bump into; some only in a rural environment, but many could be found in the back yard. Therefore, observing them “in person” (like my mosquito larva) is the ideal.

     When our family lived in town, surrounded by a little grass with only a few bushes up against the house, I snipped a twig from one of these bushes, placed it in a screened jar, and kept it on the kitchen windowsill. On the twig was a toasted marshmallow-looking ball. I knew it to be a praying mantis egg case.

     It was the middle of May and wonderfully warm. We went out. When we returned the jar was filled with tiny praying mantises – what looked to be – from a child’s figuring – a
hundred babies. (My entomologist-minded son reminds me that they are nymphs.) We examined the hatchlings . . . I mean nymphs, closely. 

     Then I took the jar outside to set them free in the shrubbery. One remained conveniently on the bush at the front door all summer. It is the way of these creatures to adopt a territory. 

     Over the course of a year, here in the farmland of Pennsylvania, we photographed our praying mantises. Our first photographs are of the tiny hatchlings in our boxwood. 

     They grew larger and larger, lived among the flowers, and became easier and easier to spot whenever we had the opportunity for a little leisure on the patio. 

     We watched them eat. The photographer had to steady himself on his elbows to take this shot of an evening meal of woolly bear.

  

   The instant I was told by a bird enthusiast that a large praying mantis could capture a hummingbird I drew in my breath. I’ve spotted these beautiful birds hovering in our zinnia garden where the mantises lie in wait.  

“I hope I never see the day when our praying mantises are fed and fattened on hummingbirds,” I told the enthusiast. “No wonder these birds are so skittish.”

Together we shuddered at the thought.

     Several toasted marshmallow-looking egg cases have been attached to the branches at the edge of the woods all winter. Mid-May will be another birthday. 

    

a yellow doily from a blog friend,     Sophia's crocus

Happy Nature Study,

Karen Andreola

Thank you Dean and Nigel, for your photography.