Your Best Bug Stories

[Crash2510]

When I was a kid (no jokes here) was climbing our apple tree when I found the biggest caterpillar I had ever seen. Like all kids I captured it and put it into a mason jar where it immediatly went into a cocoon. So I set it on top of our tv were my mother threatened to throw it away many times.

8 months later my mother and I were watching tv and we heard a loud thud.
The caterpillar had transformed not into a beautiful butterfly, but the biggest moth I had ever seen. We had "hatched" a seldom seen (Hyalophora cecropia)Cecropia moth. It had a 6" wingspan



I later let this giant go into my grandmothers backyard after learning everything I possibly could about this awsome bug.

[Caddis295]

She hates bugs.....

My wife despises bugs and spiders! I just retired last fall from the Army, and the US Gov has sent us to some pretty bad places. We were still newly weds and just moved into post housing at Fort Hood, TX. I had to go on a "trip" in the woods, leaving my wife to her systematic ways of setting up our new diggs. I came home a few days later, early in the morning, she was still sleeping and I didn't want to wake her. I went to the sink and opened up cabinets to find a glass for some OJ and could not find a glass anywhere. I went down the hall and tripped over something in the hall, it was a glass, I thought how strange and turned on the light. Much to my amazement, there were glasses up and down the hall, bathroom and bedroom. Under each glass was a bug, to include roaches, silverfish, and a rather large spider. So, if I remember right, there were twelve glasses in total.....the exact amount of our place settings we recieved for our wedding gifts.

Her answer was that she felt it was easier to capture them, and wait for me to come home and "handle the situation". That was over twelve years ago, and now....she just squashes them or captures them in a plastic cup and slides paper under it and takes them outside. What a hoot!

[bodier]

I still remember clearly when I was a kid watching the spray of sandwich pieces flying across the room as my dad bit in half a roach he had somehow built into his sandwich.

[germdoc]

How did I miss this thread before?

I have the usual palmetto bug stories--a friend and I rented a house for 3 months that was infested with these critters. One morning my leg itched, and when I reached down to scratch it I felt a lump in my pant's leg. The lump moved! I jumped up, the roach felt out, and ran right into a strategically place roach motel. We had to buy 2 or 3 of these roach motels a week and would find them filled by the end of the week. After a few beers we used to hold them up and look at the trapped critters for amusement.

Second story--in elementary school we were asked to bring in some spiders for a science project. I went next door to an area where the neighbor girl and I played house (don't let your imagination run wild, we were 9 or 10), pulled up an old board, and found a nest of black widows. I collected 5 or 6. Sure enough, they were the hit of the science fair. After that, for some reason I never had any problem finding those critters in the woodpiles nearby if I wanted to, usually to scare my friends.

[Ken Massingale]

I'm sure this won't come across as funny as it was in life:

A couple of years ago a bud, Buck, was down helping with some work in the shop. We finished working and were having a couple of brews, discussing all the great woodworking we had accomplished that afternoon.
It was a warm summer evening so the door was open and I was standing under a couple of light fixtures.
A few moths came in and started fluttering around the lights, making frequent dives around my head. I made half-hearted swats at them a few times while running my mouth, as usual.
After the brews started mellowing me a bit, I jokingly made a couple of dog-like stabs at the moths with my mouth. Buck said he was going to laugh his butt off if I caught one in my mouth, I said I doubted I would laugh!
Welll, a few minutes later I was laughing at something Buck said and one of the **** moths flew into my mouth. I didn't even realize it but suddenly Buck was on the floor yelling like crazy. As I was starting to ask what was wrong, I felt the moth fluttering around in my mouth and kinda freaked out!
Buck looked up from the floor as the moth flew out of my mouth and as the moth streaked out the shop door Buck went on his side on the floor rolling with laughter.
Seeing in my mind what Buck had just witnessed, I started laughing hysterically, soon joining Buck on the floor, whooping and hollering.
By this time, Tina had heard the commotion from the house and came out to see if we were o.k.
As she came in the shop seeing both of us on the floor laughing our butts off, she caught the laughing fever and soon joined us, not having a clue why she was laughing.
We eventually recovered, but Buck and I couldn't look at each other for a few days with breaking out in laughter.

Had to be there, I know..

[TheRic]

Ken, I can see the whole thing happening!!! It might not be as funny as it was then, but it's STILL good!!!

[25]

Had a bug not long ago, at work, old code written by someone else. There was one particular line of code that appeared fine, but something about it still seemed hauntingly strange. After spending 4 hours running in the debugger, putting trace all over the code trying to find the bug, it finally dawned on me that the line in question had condition clauses backwards...

And don't start me on thread concurrency bugs...

I at times prefer the crawly bugs as compared to these kinds of bugs.