Short-term Projects

The following options can be done as short-term studies. Sometimes it is inconvenient to try to rear an insect through its entire life cycle. It may take too long, or there may be other reasons. However, you may still be able to observe them through part of their cycle. Try some of the short-term projects listed below:

• Collect pupae of moths and butterflies, and keep them in a glass jar or screen cage until they emerge. Be sure the jar is large enough to allow the insect to expand its wings. No food is needed for pupae.
• Collect larvae and/or pupae of insects you find under loose bark or in rotten wood. Early spring is a good time to collect. Fill coffee cans half full with soft, rotten wood from where you found the immature insects. Put only one kind of immature insect in each can, and cover the can to keep the rotten wood from drying out. If drying does begin to occur while you are waiting for the adult insects to emerge, add a little water from time to time. Preserve one or two of the immature insects from each can so you can match them with the adults when they emerge. (See the section on preserving immature insects.)
• Collect mosquito egg rafts or mosquito wigglers, and keep them in jars of clear, pond water. Add a pinch of dry yeast powder to each jar to feed wigglers. Cover the jar with a cap or screen to keep adult mosquitoes from escaping when they emerge. Preserve in 70% alcohol an egg raft, a sample of each size of wiggler, a pupa and an adult.
• Collect aquatic insects of all kinds and keep them together in an aquarium. Some of the insects and their larvae may be predaceous (they feed on other insects), so you may have to keep restocking the aquarium. Pollywogs are food for some of the predaceous insects. Prepare the aquarium by putting about 2 inches of sand in the bottom. Use water from a pond or stream to fill the aquarium. If you use tap water, let it stand for a few days in the aquarium before adding insects. Plant some small aquatic plants or put some algae (green pond scum plants) in the aquarium. Cover the aquarium with a glass or screen top to keep flying aquatic insects from escaping. When larvae molt, save their cast skins in alcohol.
• Find small plants infested with aphid colonies, and transplant them into a rearing set-up as shown in Rearing Cages (Figs. B, D, and L). Observe the colony to see if you can discover where small aphids come from. Do the large aphids lay eggs?
• Repeat the activity above, but add a green lacewing or a ladybird beetle or their larva to the cage. If the aphid colony is entirely eaten, transfer the lacewing or ladybird to another aphid colony set-up.
• Collect plant galls and keep them in covered glass jars until adult insects emerge. Not all galls will produce insects for you. Some galls are produced by mites, or the gall may be old and the insects have already emerged. If you find many galls of the same kind, open some of them up to see if anything is living inside.
• Using any of the rearing cages shown in Figs. A, G, J, or K, observe a leaf-feeding caterpillar to see how it feeds and molts. Give the caterpillar fresh food daily if it is not being reared on a living plant. Supply it with leaves from the kind of plant it was collected on. Woollybear caterpillars will feed on a wide variety of plant leaves.
• Using rearing cages such as are shown in Figs. J or K, rear Mexican bean beetles, Colorado potato beetles, squash bugs, hornworms or cabbageworms, etc., in their natural habitat. Preserve the different growth stages in 70% alcohol.
• Collect rat-tail maggots and watery sludge from farm lagoons and rear the maggots in glass jars. Screen the top of the jar to keep the adult insects from escaping. What does the adult insect look like?
• In the fall, collect full-grown Monarch butterfly caterpillars from milkweed, and put them in a large glass jar (Fig. A) or emergence cage (Fig. L). If they are not fully grown (1-1/2 inches long), keep them supplied with fresh milkweed leaves until they are. In a short time after they are fully grown, they will form a chrysalis (pupa) and then emerge as adult butterflies.