Chris Larsen's Writing Portfolio

Originally posted April 2018.

WARNING: The following contains depictions of school-sanctioned cruelty to insects.

I don’t like bugs. Never have, never will.

That’s not to say that the sight of any creepy-crawly sends me running. When I was in pre-school, my friends and I used to catch grasshoppers and tiny millipedes. Tiny spiders never bothered me. But once the bug reaches a certain size, I’m out. I’m slightly ashamed of how many times I hesitated to enter my apartment in Florida due to finding a giant moth making itself at home on my front door.

Pictured: Worst neighbor ever. Toho Co., Ltd.

But the worst bugs? The stingers. Bees, wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, you name it. If it can sting you, I want no part of it. I’m not even allergic. At least, I think I’m not. I’ve never actually been stung, and don’t intend to be any time soon. But if I so much as hear a buzzing in my ear, chances are I’ll flinch in an embarrassingly over-the-top but completely genuine manner.

Now, this isn’t a “danger” that I usually have to contend with. But during my freshman year of high school, I was forced to face my fears for, of all things, a biology project.

Some school assignments gain notoriety among the student body, even if not everyone has to complete them. Every school has a teacher whose research paper requirements are famously difficulty, or whose chemistry labs become the stuff of legend. In my school, one such assignment was the infamous “Bug Catching Project” of Honors Biology. In this end-of-term project, students had to collect 25 different specimens of insect, with at least five examples of five different families. We learned how to create “killing jars” (soak a cotton ball in nail polish remover and toss it in a jar), and then had to pin the asphyxiated corpses of these creatures into a display box, labeled with their scientific names. Gruesome stuff when you think about it.

I was going to put a picture of a “Bug Box”
here, but it looked creepy, so instead, have
a picture of Bugs boxing. Warner Bros.

I wasn’t looking forward to this assignment, but what choice did I have? One afternoon after school, my mother and I went to a nearby nature trail to see what we could find. As we walked up to one of the posted maps of the area, we stopped in our tracks.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Out of the wooden kiosk emerged the largest bee I had ever seen. Nope. We quickly walked away to explore the trail for some less threatening bugs to capture. This wasNOT the challenge we wanted to start with.

After a couple hours of successful hunting, we returned to the car, being sure to give the giant bee’s kiosk a wide berth. Maybe we’d come back for it some other time. Maybe.

That weekend, we returned to the trail, this time with my father and younger brother in tow. We had a pretty good system set up for catching bugs by this point: one of us would place a plastic cup over the insect, which we’d then scoop into a Ziploc bag. It was working out pretty well for us, and I was nearing the required total of specimens. The problem?

I still needed a bee.

Before leaving, we decided, either through hubris or desperation, to see if we could rouse this bee from its hiding spot. My dad banged on the wooden kiosk.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

It worked.

What happened next was a blur. This bee was ANGRY. Helpful son that I was, I hid behind the minivan, watching the bee furiously darting around the parking lot. Next thing I knew, someone (I forget who, but feel pretty confident in saying it wasn’t me) managed to trap it under one of our plastic cups. The problem was that our normal strategy of scooping the captive insect into a Ziploc bag felt entirely too risky for this particular adversary. So we brought out the big guns: a garbage bag. We tossed the cup, bee and all, into a black garbage bag, quickly tied it shut, and threw it into the back of the van. That entire ride home, we listened to the bee’s wings loudly vibrating against the plastic bag, sounding like an angry helicopter.

Pictured: Angry helicopter. © Ad Meskens / Wikimedia Commons

When we got home, we knew we would never be able to get this monster into the killing jar on our own. So we did the next best thing and tossed the bag into the freezer. The cold would send the bee into a dormant state, allowing us to handle it safely. After a while, we dropped it into the jar and let it sit there for quite some time, just to be sure. (I’m aware that this project makes me sound like a sociopath, but please keep in mind that there was unfortunately no way to get out of it.)

The rest of the night was uneventful. My bug box was coming together quite well. The bee was pinned, and the project was seemingly ready to be wrapped up. Suddenly, one of the other insects pinned to the board started to wiggle. Apparently it was only MOSTLY dead. So we dropped it back into the killing jar for a few more minutes. “Great, watch the bee come back to life now,” I joked.

Dear reader, it is important to me that you understand that what I am about to say is not in any way exaggerated for dramatic effect: the INSTANT I finished saying that, the front leg of the bee started to move, ever so slowly. Then another leg. I panicked. The last thing I needed was to be attacked by a zom-bee out for revenge on the family that killed it. So we did the only thing we could think of: dropped it directly into a bowl of rubbing alcohol. The twitching stopped. Finally, at long last, the bee was dead. The nightmare was over.

Afterwards, I got an A on the project, as well as traumatic memories to haunt me for a lifetime. High school, everybody!