Hello! This is the second post in my Backyard Bug Study series. Did you know there are over one million different kinds of insects? How about that for every one human there are two million of them?  Or that they are in nearly all habitats?  Or did you know there are over a five billion bugs in the world? No wonder we are so familiar with them!

Bugs. What are bugs? Many people use the word “bugs” interchangeably for “insects.” But should they? So lets see if we can decide… is it a bug or an insect?

Let’s start with some scientific information about insects. Insect scientists, called entomologists, categorize all of creation. For insects they are in the Kingdom of Animalia (animals), the Phylum of Arthropoda and their Class is Insecta (comes from insectum and it means cut into sections). Arthropods are animals that lack a backbone, which are called invertebrates. There are several types of arthropods classified into groups that have common traits.  In this article I will be discussing what insects and bugs are and how you can tell them apart.

What are Insects?

Here are some of the characteristics that insects have, that bugs may not.

• Six Jointed Legs – All insects have legs that have three sections. Look at praying mantis for a great example of this.

• Segmented Body – Head, Thorax (The midsection of the body) and Abdomen (the tail end) are the main 3 parts of an insect’s body.

• Breathe through tiny holes in their bodies called spiracles – These tiny holes let air in through the exoskeleton and directly to the trachea (The windpipe) and then into the lungs.

• Antennae/Feelers – They use echolocation to send sound waves that bounce off of objects then come back. Bats and dolphins also use echolocation. They can figure out distance by how long it takes for the sound to bounce back to them.

• Metamorphosis – What happens when the young body of an animal goes through a radical change in form when it grows up.

• Exoskeleton – An exoskeleton is sort of like a protective armor that insects have. It doesn’t grow with them though, so they have to molt / shed yearly and grow a new exoskeleton.

• Compound Eyes – Most insects have compound eyes, which means their eye is composed of thousands of tiny lenses.

Then what is a bug? 

True bugs are insects, but they do have some differences. Some bugs have more than six legs, where insects, do not. Most true bugs will have an X or a V on their back. Also most true bugs have a proboscis (a straw-like mouth) so they can suck pollen and other things out of a flower. The wings are different for true bugs.  The front wings of true bugs are thicker and colored near where they are attached to their body, and are more clear and thin towards the end of the wing. The hind wings are usually clear and under the front wings. Finally, true bugs also have three ‘life phases’ while insects have four stages. The true bug stages are: egg, larva/nymph, adult. The insects however, are: Egg, Larva/Nymph, Pupa, Adult.

What do they have in common?

Both have exoskeletons, and are invertebrates and have many other features that are the same such as: They both have three main body parts, they also have compound eyes, jointed legs, and most bugs have six legs like insects. Since there are even MORE things, I’ll put a diagram of some things that they have in common, and what they have different.

Activity: Bug and Insect Identification

Let’s take a closer look at nature! Let’s get into your backyard and see if we can identify some insects! First, remember you don’t want to touch bugs with your bare hands unless you know what the bug is! Remember some bugs bite and sting. So gloves, a net and tweezers are nice to have! When we go on a nature scavenger hunt, we try not to harm the things we are studying. So plan to release them after you are finished.

Items you will need to take with you.

• Magnifying Glass.
• Jar (with small air holes punched in the lid) to hold specimen.  When we were little, we had something like this Bugwatch to use to examine bugs (and anything else we could fit in these containers)!
• Gloves.
• Tweezers.
• Bug Net.
• Notebook.
• Pencil.
• Camera. Our grandmother gave us real cameras when we were really little. I think I was six. I still have this camera and it is still takes great pictures. I do have to use tape on the battery compartment to keep it closed because I broke the cover several years ago!

When you find a bug to study you can either look at it there where you found it or put it in your container.  See if you can tell if it is an insect or bug by reviewing the chart above. Take a picture of it or draw it. My brother is writing a whole series on Nature Journaling. This might be a great time to start one!

Resources

Here are some great products that helped me write this article. I thought you might find them helpful too.

Flying Creatures by Apologia. This is the science curriculum we use in our homeschool.

Bugs. The World’s Best Terrifying Insects. We have had this book for years, but my brothers and I have all just sat around and read this book because it is so good.

Bug Hunter by Smithsonian. It is a hands-on guide to the natural world.

I hope this gives you an idea of what the differences are between bugs and insects.  I’ll be writing lots of articles about insects in our backyard and we will talk about both, so I wanted to start here so we all could understand the differences… but I’ll still probably slip up and call them bugs!

I hope you enjoyed my article … until next time!

Hi, I’m Blake. This is the first post in a new series I’m starting called the Backyard Bug Study. Guess what I will be writing about? Yep… Bugs! And Insects.  

First let me introduce myself to you! I’m Blake and I’m eleven years old. I have two brothers who also write on this blog. We are all homeschoolers. We live in a small town in Tennessee called La Grange.

It is a very rural area where we have around 40 acres of land with a huge house! So large we can’t manage all of it! We are trying to sell it to buy a smaller house and less land. So I thought I would create something to help me record the great memories of my first home! 

Our backyard has tons of clover and dandelions (there are weeds growing in it too)! We have a wide variety of trees, and some of them are very fun to climb! 🙂 And bugs. Lots of bugs. We have stinging bugs, flying bugs, digging bugs, biting bugs, swimming bugs, hopping bugs, boring bugs… you get the idea. We have bugs! So this should be an easy series to write because we have LOTS of insects and bugs here!

And while we are on the subject of bugs, let me tell you about the word “bug”. Many people use the word “bug” when really they are looking at an insect.  Bug only accurately describes a few! And even the ones that have the word “bug” in their name, most aren’t even bugs at all! We will learn all about that in this backyard bug study! Which ones are “true” bugs and which ones are insects, where they live, what their natural predators are, are they harmful or helpful to your plants and garden, and lots of other fun and interesting facts. 

I hope you will follow along with my new series and that you will find it helpful! Maybe it will give you some ideas on what to study in your own backyard! If you do choose to join us, please leave a comment each week to let us know what you found!  

Have a great week!

Hello this week’s post is going to be the C of my alphabet blogging series. C is for  Crabbing at the Carolina Coast. Every few years we rent a beach house for a month in North Carolina. My mom is from New Bern and this is when we get to spend time with her family.

One of the many fun things we look forward to doing when we are at the beach is crabbing.  I’m not sure if everyone crabs the way we do. We “crab” with a net to catch the crabs, and a bucket to temporarily put the crabs in before we let them go. We crab at night, because these ghost crabs are nocturnal. We usually go out at about nine to ten o’ clock at night because we see the most crabs then.

Here is how we catch crabs. Once we see a crab, we lunge out and cover the crab with our net. You need to practice catching shells with your net for a little while before going crabbing. If you don’t, you will probably end up killing some of these crabs accidentally. Practice getting the shell in the center of the net. After you have the net on your crab, carefully flip the crab into the net. Then put it over to the bucket and drop it in. I usually have caught about 5 crabs when we release them. We release them about a foot from the ocean, and then watch them scurry into the nearest wave.

We love going crabbing. We do it almost every night when we are at the beach. We live 1,000 miles from the North Carolina coast, unfortunately. So when we are there, we get our fill of crabbing!

This last trip to the beach, we did a different kind of crabbing.  Let me tell you a story about a crab we named Earl. We found Earl after the hurricane named Earl that hit the beach while we were there. It was after the hurricane that we went back to the beach to look for new shells that were moved to the shore by the hurricane. While we were shell hunting my brother Gage found a conch shell and when he picked it up he noticed crab legs were inside of the shell! He ran to show mom and we all sat around studying it, thinking of a name for it and wondering what kind of crab it was.

Eventually we came up with the name Earl, after the hurricane that had just been there. We got a bucket of salt water and put Earl in the water on some sand. We studied him all day and watched how he behaved. We released him later that day, so we thought for sure our time with Earl  was over, but we were wrong.

The next day we went out shell hunting again and we found lots of cool shells and conchs. As we were looking through them, Gage noticed a shell very similar to Earl’s, the crab we had caught and named the day before. Gage quickly picked up the shell to investigate and much to our surprise, there he saw the same crab legs sticking out of the shell. We had lots of fun looking at Earl while we were playing that day. And again, we released him in the late afternoon. But this time it was the last time we saw Earl.

I hope you enjoyed my post and maybe it inspired you to go crabbing some day!

Hello! I’ve decided that I’m doing a chain of animal posts for our creative writing linkup for June, but this will be the last about animals because I have no more animals to tell you about. The other articles are: Our Turtle, our Cats and now finally our dog Molly.

Molly is an Australian Shepherd. She’s black, white and brown in some places. We got her as a present from one of our best friends as a little puppy back in 2007. We named her Molly Grace Corlew… and there is a story about her name.  So, why did we name her Molly Grace? It was meant as a joke because she was NOT graceful at all. She would tumble-down the steps, or she would run really fast and then just plop over on her side and bang right into you. But that was about six years ago now she’s fully grown and is a GREAT guard dog.

Mostly Molly stays around the house and watches. Sometimes she wanders off or follows us into the woods, but she is mostly a stick-around-the-house-dog. She doesn’t know too many commands but she knows some basic ones like: Sit, Stay, and sometimes she will lay down. She doesn’t do roll over or catch but she does respond to “Go get it!” She will run after anything moving. Sometimes Molly goes into “Crazy dog” mode where she runs around wild or flips over on her back and kicks her feet in the air, its funny to watch when she does that.

We also used to have one other dog, his name was Blackie. It was a black dog and it wandered up as a stray. But after a few days Blackie disappeared. We think we know why!  There is a little house we often drive by and there is a dog that looks exactly like him. He even has a red collar like the one we put on Blackie.

Thanks for reading the last of my animal chain posts. Maybe I’ll come up with another chain but until then!