4-H member Ariana Cook of Powell picked up a second-place ribbon at the Pennsylvania Farm Show with a collection of insects.
Story and photo by Rick Hiduk
(Original published in the Weekend Review)
A lot of patience and determination resulted in a second-place finish for a 4-H member from Powell who returned to the Pennsylvania Farm Show this past week. Ariana Cook, daughter of Brian and Angela Cook, is a 10th grader at Towanda Jr./Sr. High School and has been participating with 4-H for a little more than eight years. Early on, when she was looking for projects to take on, she came across Entomology.
“I thought insects were very interesting, so I went for it and stuck with it,” Ariana explained.
Her project worked in two directions simultaneously. As she read about different kinds of insects, she kept hers eyes open in hopes of coming across one. In the meantime, she collected insects that caught her eye. “If I see one and think it’s cool, I put it in a jar or baggie and freeze it,” she remarked.
The latter was the process for adding an assassin bug to her collection.
“They’re pretty cool. They stick their needle nose into their prey and inject enzymes into it that liquifies it,” she related. “I didn’t even know that I had caught it. I read an article about it, and realized that I had one.”
Another favorite of Ariana’s is a large European hornet, mistaken by many because it seemed to appear on the east coast in large numbers at the same as the notorious “Murder Hornet,” scientifically know as the Asian giant hornet, on the west coast. It’s European cousin is harmless for the most part but no less intimidating.
“It was actually in our house,” Ariana said of the hornet. “I was terrified and called my mom at work and asked her to come home and catch it.”
When she had amassed and identified approximately 50 insects, Ariana started arranging them in a box about three inches deep, carefully pinning each of them to a styrofoam background under labels that depict their order, such as Lepidoptera – butterflies and moths, Hemiptera – bugs and aphids, Orthoptera – grasshoppers and crickets, Diptera – flies, Odenata – dragonflies, and Hymenoptera – bees and ants.
Among the many eye-catching insects in her collection are a beautiful, nearly translucent green Luna moth and an adult Spotted Lanternfly that family friends caught in Dauphin County, froze and mailed to her.
After working on it for seven years, Ariana considered her project ready to enter last year, but it had an accident on the way to the Farm Show. “It didn’t make it in one piece,” she noted. “I was very sad. It was heartbreaking to see all of my hard work destroyed.”
But all – especially the insects – was not lost, and Ariana had another year to put her collection back together and give it some new finishing touches. When she arrived at the Farm Show Complex with her fellow 4-H potato graders on Jan. 10, she went to the Family Living Department’s 4-H Opportunities hall and found a bright red ribbon affixed to her entry prominently positioned in a showcase.