We've been collecting bugs lately it seems. James kept a rather large spider after it was dead so that we could examine it with the Eyeclops (kind of an extreme magnifying glass that shows your item on your tv screen). A week later, right on the day Jeremy was learning about the different parts of insects, we found a dead yellow jacket on the neighbor's driveway. So, he joined our spider.

Then, last week, we saw a huge red and black thing crawling across the yard. It went up a tree, crawled back down, walked on the sidewalk all the way to the neighbor's tree, and went up that one too. We looked it up, and it was a cow-killer wasp, also known as a velvet ant. The females don't have wings, and they look for bees' nests to lay their eggs in. Then the bees take care of the larvae, and Mrs. Cow-Killer doesn't have to do squat. So, that's what she was doing up that tree?

Anyway, yesterday, we saw another female cow-killer. On a whim, I decided to kill her so we could add her to our collection. Now, if she had wings, this would never have occurred to me! So, I got a shoe and proceeded to try to beat her to death in the grass. No such luck. Thank you God for not giving her wings! I then tried to spray her with Ant and Roach Raid. Nothing. I finally decided to try the nature-friendly (supposedly) version of Raid for ants, and that did the job. So, she has joined our yellow jacket and spider in the container, but I can't help but feel bad. I don't think I'll be purposely killing any more bugs for our collection any time soon. And unfortunately, the spray darkened her bright red coloring so she's not even as cool to look at as she was before. I feel so evil!