BUG OUT!

by
Wendy Gonzalez-Canal
2AG Entomology Major



Dr. Carl Barfield and the Lady Beetles.

Do you remember Halloween when you were younger? It was, at least for me, the most exciting holiday aside from Christmas. You get to dress up and be whatever you want to be. And to top it off, you get to eat as many sweets as you want.

So, if on August 5th you felt confused walking through campus because of all the people in insect costumes, don't worry... it was not a flashback from childhood, and no, you did not forget it was Halloween. It was the Bugge Faire.

The Bugge Faire is the end project of a very popular class (ENY 1001) at the University of Florida taught by Dr. Carl Barfield called "Bugs and People". At the beginning of the course, students are separated into groups of four to five people. The teams are told to choose a creative insect-related name. Some of this summer's most popular names included:

Throughout the semester the teams come up with an insect related dish. Calm down, the dishes don't actually have insect in them, they just look like insects. As an option, the teams can also choose to dress up. Most of the costumes are home-made and they allow for each student's creativity to shine through. Since this part of the Faire is optional, the teams can choose to work as a group or individually.

This summer's Bugge Faire was held at Pugh Hall at 12:30 pm on Wednesday, August 5th. If you were on campus around that time, the funky outfits are probably making a lot more sense now. Once the groups were all checked in for grading each student was free to walk around and try the dishes prepared by other teams. The Bugge Faire is a fun event where students get to be kids again while working together and learning cool facts about insects along the way.


And I thought

eating insects and spiders

was gross. Yummy!

Take a look at lots of digital photos of this event.


Thomas Fasulo is the newsletter editor. You can submit news anytime to fasulo@ufl.edu. Issues are published the middle of each month. Submit items for an issue by the 7th of that month. Detailed articles, such as this one, must be submitted before the first of the month for that month's newsletter.

Return to the September 2009 issue.