I still remember being dragged through cemeteries to look for owl pellets for his classes and climbing over what then seemed like sheer cliffs searching for shell fossils. One day he came home with a red wooden bug box and handed me a cheap plastic magnifying glass to examine the insects pinned to the board inside. Our backyard was infested with pill bugs and I named each one, tapping it on the chest to watch it curl up into a ball. Fifteen years later I'm not sure why. Entomologist Heidi Appel, who organized Bug Camp with Frazier, is not surprised.
Kids also encounter bugs a lot.
They're right there in their environment all the time. The gross-out factor may explain one of Advanced Bug Camp's more exciting experiments, in which the children learned all about parasitoids, organisms that live in or on the body of a single host during development, eventually killing the host. The kids watched the parasitoid, a Cotesia congregata wasp, lay eggs inside a hornworm caterpillar and then, a few days later, watched the caterpillar get eaten alive from the inside out once the eggs had hatched. Frazier and Appel organized the first Bug Camp for Teachers in 1995 after local elementary school teachers asked for ideas on teaching science. The next summer, Bug Camp for Kids opened its doors.