Bug Trap

Unlike most people I know, and especially my mother-in-law, I LIKE spiders and bugs. Well, I don't roaches, no matter how clean entymologist tell me they are. And gnats and flies are definitely off the list too. Whenever I find a spider, I have my husband put it outside so that it can live and eat more of the bugs that I don't like.

This past March, my son received a bug house as a birthday gift. Now this must be the most annoying, worse bug house I have ever seen. At first I thought it cute with it's decorative bugs and inside lanscaping. It has a button you can push that plays the most annoying bug sounds I've ever heard. And inside are three bugs that light up. Instead of looking like fireflys, they look more and more like radioactive roaches to me.

Well, spring has come and so have the bugs. Some big wolf spider thought it would find a meal in my bedroom and, instead of tossing it outside, I decided to put it in this bug house. It was all for naught because the bug died a mere 24 hours later. All dead bugs are icky and nasty so I had to have my son clean it out.

And just a week later I found another large wolf spider! My kids were thrilled and hit that noise button a hundred times. I'm sure all that ambient noise drove the spider insane; either that or it was scared of the radioactive roaches that occupied it's cell. Whatever the cause, it found a hole in the handle and never came out. I'm sure it's shrunken body is still in the bug house.

It was only a day later when we discovered another spider! I put the spider in the bug house and instantly regretted it. This one was probably going to die too. I used to save spiders and now I'd inavertly been the cause of two deaths. A third death was quite forseeable. So I took the bug cage outside and put it on it's side with the top off. Surely the spider would crawl out and escape.

Six hours later the idiot spider was still there. It happily had strung a couple of web lines and was sitting on one of the radioactive roaches. Since I couldn't just leave the bug cage outside for the kids to steal, I decided that spider had to go by force. So I took the bug and shook it upside down- and the spider was still there! I banged it against the wall and banged it against the ground to get that spider out and back into it's natural habitat.

How does the story end? Well, I killed it of course. You see, as I banged the bug cage on the ground, the spider fell out. But I banged it again and accidently smashed the spider as I hit it against the ground.

So the bug house of death has been retired and I will no longer try to catch bugs for my kids to see. They'll just have to catch their own bugs.