The Dry Garden: What’s that bug?

Posted on | March 20, 2010 | No Comments

Pterotus obscuripennis. Source: Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Click on the telltale feathery antennae to be taken to the museum's Beetle Project.

Three things happen when you plant a garden. You meet your neighbors, who stop to chat. You meet their kids, who hang out. And you meet the bugs that the kids find. The ability to identify the bugs ensures you heroic status in the eyes of children. Failure to identify them is a crashing experience not to be wished upon one’s worst enemy.

Click here to keep reading the Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times as Cal State Northridge entomologist James N. Hogue gives tips on identifying bugs for kids.

Hogue is co-author with Arthur V. Evans of  “Field Guide to Beetles of California.” Click here to find out about Hogue’s April 3 class “Insects and Native Plant Gardens”  at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley, California. Or click here for the summer camp program of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, including classes on structures that animals build and what’s in dirt. For the San Diego Museum of Natural History family and kids programs, click here and for the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum programs, here.

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