Bucks for Bugs

By Joan McKee
photography by Cliff White

A Salisbury senior turns his insect collecting hobby into a home business.

he enclosed porch on the Meissen's farm home is overrun with insects, but no one is reaching for the bug spray. Seventeen-year-old Randy Meissen brings in beetles, butterflies and bugs whenever he finds them, and his parents don't mind. Randy is the owner of Meissen Entomology Co., which sells mounted insects to teachers, collectors and anyone else who wants to learn about these six-legged creatures.

Randy handles his insect specimens carefully, making sure he doesn't break antennae or limbs.

Our computer system has abug in it. He's been bitten by the golf bug and plays four times a week. Shhh! The room has been bugged. Go away, you're bugging me! I've been in bed with a flu bug.

Randy became interested in insects when he was in third grade. He and his mother, Shelley, saw a collection at the Missouri State Fair, and they decided to make a butterfly and moth collection of their own. When he was a sophomore, he collected 99 insects for his Future Farmers of America project. That same year he won second place in the state entomology contest. His advisor, Ron Scheiderer, was so impressed with Randy's collection that he bought it. That's how Randy's company was born.

Now a senior at Salisbury R-IV High School, Randy uses an internet site and catalog to advertise his business. Running a company takes a lot of skill, but the key to Randy's success is knowing where and when to find the insects that his customers want to buy.

The closest source is right outside his house. At night the yard light brings in many night-flying insects, including moths, beetles, cockroaches and dobsonflies, from the surrounding fields. In the summer and early fall, he collects insects on the roof of his white garage. "It's a big bug beacon," Randy says.

With more than 88,000 species of insects in the United States, it may seem like there is an endless supply. However, 54 insects, like the hoosier grasshopper and the slightly musical conehead katydid, are listed as rare or endangered in Missouri because of loss of habitat and pesticides. And some rare butterflies, like the regal fritillary, are so beautiful that collectors are one of the reasons there are so few of them. Before starting a collection, learn to identify insects so you don't harm a rare or endangered species. The best way is to watch insects where they live. Visit a pond and see what flies or floats by. Find a plant and look for aphids under the leaves. Look under a mulberry tree to see what insects are attracted to the fruit. Sit near the flower bed and spy at buzzing bees. Follow a line of marching ants back to their underground home. Turn over rocks and rotten logs and see what lurks in the dark. And don't forget to look around your house and even on your pets. A magnifying glass allows you to watch even the smallest insect. A net will help you get a closer look at flying insects. A field guide will show you which insect you are watching. If you decide to start an insect collection, most field guides give specific details on how to preserve them. Mounting insects is difficult and time consuming. Take only the insects you have time to preserve.

After a rain, Randy checks the barrels at the end of the garage's gutters. "I find lots of beetles and an occasional northern mole cricket," Randy says. He is careful to identify crickets before capturing them alive. "The endangered prairie mole cricket is much larger than the northern mole cricket," says Randy, who leaves endangered species in their habitat.

For most species, Randy has to use his knowledge of insects' habits to find them. For example, Randy looks for cicada killers, a type of wasp, at the edge of woods or near brush by a pond. "They just streak by. I have to take a net and run them down," he says.

Chasing them isn't easy as they weave around looking for cicadas and crickets to take back to their nest. He uses gloves to handle them because they have a large stinger and huge mouth parts. "They will eat through the net if they are left in it too long," Randy says.

He also avoids the mouth of the assassin bug because it injects poison to kill moths and grasshoppers and to discourage capture. "It hurts like heck," Randy says. Because he spends a lot of time studying insects, he rarely gets hurt when handling them. "I get stung more often when I'm not collecting," he says.

Randy's knowledge of insects helped him win first place in the State Science Olympiad Entomology Identification Contest for high school students.

To find the variety of insects he needs to keep his customers happy, Randy carries a collection jar everywhere he goes in the summer. When he's raking hay on his parents' farm, he stops the tractor and picks up interesting insects along the way. When fishing at his uncle's lake, he might spy a flat head metallic wood boring beetle on top of a weed. When mushroom hunting he might stumble across a six-spotted green tiger beetle. When he does, into a collection jar they go.

His parents and three younger brothers help him locate insects, too. One day his father, Ralph, saw some Chinese mantids on the side of a building near a railroad track. According to field guides, these insects normally aren't found in Missouri. Randy rushed over to collect them. "They must have ridden in on the train," Randy says.

Many insects are abundant, but only during certain times. For example, polyphemus moths aren't easy to find during a drought, but in years when it rains a lot, they are easy to locate.

Randy knew he had a lot of work to do last summer during the hatching of the 17- and 13-year cicadas. He collected 150 because he won't be able to find any more until the year 2011--the next time they emerge from the ground. "Some insects are out for such a short time, you have to be ready," Randy says.

After he captures an insect, Randy kills it quickly so it doesn't get damaged. After many experiments, he discovered that liquid tire buffer, used to clean inner tubes, does the best job. He wets a sponge with it and puts the sponge in the bottom of a jar. In about 10 seconds the insect stops moving, but he leaves it there for about half a day so it doesn't revive.

"I can't wait too long," Randy says. "I don't want them to dry out because then I can't spread out their legs and wings."

Randy pins the insect to styrofoam and lets it dry for at least three days. "In the summer the whole porch is overrun with dried bugs," he says. He stores the dried insects in moth balls, otherwise other insects might eat his profits.

Randy mounts his insects two ways. The easiest method is to put them in a boxed frame against a cotton batting covered with white cloth. The more time-consuming way is to encase the insects in plastic. Randy pours plastic around the insect in a mold and teases the air bubbles from around the insect's body. He has to be careful so the tiny legs and antennae do not break off. After the plastic dries, he polishes the mount. The finished product makes a decorative paperweight, and the insect can be seen from all sides.

Before mounting, Randy makes sure he has the right insect for his customers. Identifying insects can be quite tricky. Many have several common names, so Randy learns the scientific name to be sure he has the right one. For example, the spotted cucumber beetle is also called the southern corn rootworm, the nine-spotted cucumber beetle and the squash beetle. Although the scientific name, Diabrotica undecimpunctata, is long, it helps Randy know he has the right insect--no matter how many names it may have.

"When you don't know insects and how they are related," Randy says, "you think everything is a butterfly or a beetle, but there's a huge amount of difference between them and a lot of different species." In North America, for example, there are between 25,000 and 30,000 species of beetles. Randy estimates that he has between 400 and 500 different beetle species in his collection.

Randy shares what he has learned with children by giving talks in local elementary schools and by supplying schools with mounted insects. The money he earns will help him pay for college--where he plans to study medicine so he can cure people of what bugs them.