Bug Squad

County fairs are filled with fun, food and festivities. They're meant to educate, inform and entertain. What we've always loved about the county fairs: the incredible exhibits. Especially exhibits dealing with photographs and paintings of insects.

There is such a thing as a free lunch. And a free breakfast. And a free dinner. And a free snack. That is, if you're a freeloader fly.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." --John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra Muir said it well.

Oh, what a (moth) night! Saturday, July 18 marked the beginning of National Moth Week and the Bohart Museum of Entomology obliged with an indoor and outdoor open house, its first-ever evening open house. The event took place from 8 to 11 p.m.

Plants can eavesdrop. They can sense danger. So says ecologist Richard 'Rick' Karban, professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and author of the newly published book, Plant Sensing and Communication (University of Chicago Press).