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Show Thursday, June 26, 2008 OREM TIMES Page 5 i1 ' WW no lbs NEWS AND IDEAS FROM CLASSROOMS AND EDUCATORS Wonderful creatures live outside your door Linda Butler NORTH COUNTY STAFF You don't have to travel around the world to find strange and wonderful creatures. crea-tures. Dozens of different minibeasts bugs, insects, and other creepy-crawlies live right in your neighborhood. Most of the creatures we call "bugs" belong to the category known as arthropods little animals with jointed legs and hard body covering (exoskel-etons.) (exoskel-etons.) Arthropods include insects, spiders, centipedes, millipedes mil-lipedes and crustaceans. Finding minibeasts is easy. Bugs like dark moist places. Turn over a rock and you're likely to find a spider, roly-poly bug, ant, snail or worm. Many creatures, such as worms, snails, ladybugs, crickets and roly-poly bugs can be safely picked up and examined by hand. A magnifying glass can help take an even closer look. Some bugs such as spiders and centipedes, are best picked up with gloved hands or enticed into a clear glass or plastic container con-tainer for closer examination. A "pooter," or breath-powered bug vacuum is another way to safely capture insects and is easy to build. A pooter can be made from a pint canning jar and U-inch flexible tubing. Cut the tubing into two pieces, one 8-inches and the other 16-iriches long. Snugly attach a smajl piece of nylon stocking with a rubber band to the end of the shorter tube. This prevents inhalation of insects. Trace and cut a circle cir-cle of cardboard (a cereal box works well) to fit inside the lid. With a hole punch, make two holes in the cardboard for the tubes. The tubes should fit snugly snug-ly through the cardboard. Use thin "ropes" of modeling clay to make an airtight seal. Put the long end of the pooter near an insect and quickly inhale. The bug will be gently sucked into the jar. After observing the minibeast. release it back into the garden. Bugs can be kept in a plastic bug house or glass jar for several sev-eral hours. Rubber band a piece of nylon stocking or thin cloth on the top to keep the bug from escaping and to allow for air circulation. Be sure to release your insects after you've studied stud-ied them. Children enjoy watching y 'Sl hi it 1 iMii (1s Elissa Butler prepares to capture a small beetle with a "pooter" vacuum. Insects make a fascinating study for children. LINDA BUTLER, 'North County a breath-powered insect minibeasts at work. Worms and ants are great "tunnelers." Ants are powerful and can carry car-ry up to 10-dmes the amount of their body's weight. Ask your child to f igure how much he could carry if he were an ant. Worms are work their magic by turning decaying plants into compost. It's easy to watch the excavation powers of ants or worms when they're kept in a simple habitat. Watch worms mix dirt by filling a quart glass jar about 2 inches with loose, moist soil. Layer with '2-inches of sand, then another 2 inches of soil. Add a half inch layer of old lettuce. Cover the lettuce with about an inch of moist soil and add 2-3 worms. Cover the opening open-ing with a piece of nylon stocking stock-ing or thin cloth and secure with a rubber band or canning jar ring. Because worms like the dark, a "collar" will keep the worms happy and active. The collar is simply a tube of dark construction paper that you slide over the jar. Keep the jar in a cool spot, and look after 34 days. After a week or two, the layer of lettuce will have been eaten and the sand mixed into the soil. Worms are great for the garden, they help keep the soil loose, so plant roots can grow more easily. When you are finished with your worm habitat, set your worms free in the garden. An ant house is made in a similar manner to the worm habitat. However instead of moist soil, ants like a drier environment. Fill a canning jar about 23 full with dry sandy or crumbly soil. Add about 15-20 ants. A pooter is great for catching ants. Ants love sweets, so sprinkle a pinch of sugar on top of the soil and add a moist cotton ball so your ants can drink. Ants will also appreciate ap-preciate a dark collar to cover their jar. The darkness will encourage en-courage the ants to tunnel near the sides of the jar. Unless there is a queen ant, the colony will not reproduce and survive. Set them free after two weeks. Most insects are too quick to track, but snails move slowly and you can follow their movement. move-ment. Have snail races by placing several snails inside a circle of string or a hula hoop that's about 2-feet in diameter. See which snail crawls out first. A small dab of paint on a snail's shell can make it easier to identify. You may want to keep track of where your snail explores over the next several hours or even the next day or two. Most bugs are silent. But crickets, though difficult to see, are easy to hear. You can use a cricket as a thermometer. The warmer the weather, the more quickly a cricket chirps. Count the number of cricket chirps in 1.3 seconds, then add 40 to get the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. Minibeasts are all around us. Most are harmless, and many, such as bees and worms, are very helpful. Take time this summer getting acquainted with some of these tiny but interesting in-teresting neighbors. Codner graduates Steven Codner of Orem was among 1 19 students recently awarded the Doctor of Optometry Optom-etry degree f rom Southern College of Optometry in Memphis, Mem-phis, Tenn. A 2004 graduate of Brigham Young University and a graduate of Orem High School, Codner is the son of Bill Codner of Cedar Hills and Debbie Auxier of Orem. 1 Utah Arts Festival Celebrate all the arts visual, vi-sual, musical, literary, and performing arts at the Utah Arts Festival, June 26-29 at Library Square, 200 E. 400 South, Salt Lake City, from noon to 11 p.m. Many child-friendly child-friendly activities and areas are at the Arts Festival. Tickets Tick-ets are $10 for adults (ages 13 and up), $5 Seniors. Children 12 and under are free. Complete Com-plete festival information may be found at www.uaf. Heber Valley Powwow Experience Native American Ameri-can music, dance, and culture at the Heber Valley Powwow June 27-29 at Soldier Hollow in Midway. Admission $6. Children 6 and under are free. Friday at 6 p.m. is the grand entry and intertribal dancing danc-ing until 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday gates open at 1 1 a.m., dancing begins at noon and continues until 10 p.m. The Powwow is a unique opportunity op-portunity to view a range of traditional dance styles and regalia, as well as to hear stoiytellers, and see Native American arts and crafts and taste traditional food. Enjoy Mountain Man demos on Sat urday and Sunday. Lavender Days Celebrate the Lavender harvest June 27 and 28 at Young Living Lavender Farm in Mona. Young Living is the largest lavender farm in North America. Experience 120 acres of lavender in full bloom. Enjoy cooking and gardening classes, paddleboat rides, pony rides, professional jousting, live music, and more. Tickets are available at the gate: $8.50 adults; $4.50 children chil-dren ages 4-12. children 3 and under are free. Gates open at 9 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Reel Science or Real Science? July 1 is science movie night at the Salt Lake City public library, 210 E. 400 South. A free screening of "Them," a 1954 classic terror-ific big bug movie. (5:30 p.m. The A-bomb has spawned a colony of giant gi-ant murderous ants bent on destruction. After the movie, join Maggie Shao, Assistant Professor of Horticulture at Utah State University, for a discussion on insects and horticulture. hor-ticulture. Note, parking meters are free after 6 p.m. "We The People" Musical Revue Come hear the legendary Janie Thompson in her last public performance. "We The People" is a 45-minute Broadway-style review celebrating our great American heritage. This performance will appeal to both young and old. The free performances are at the Provo Tabernacle, 100 South University Ave., Provo, on July 2 and 3 at 6 and 8 p.m., and on July 4 at 2 and 4 p.m. Colonial Days Step back in time and celebrate the Fourth of July with the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum in downtown IVovo. Colonial Days is a free four-day celebration cel-ebration July 2-5. The area on around the M inting Museum, 275 E. Center. Provo, becomes a Colonial Village featuring men and women dressed in period clothing, demonstrations demonstra-tions of candle making, leath-erworking, leath-erworking, butter churning; stage productions. Colonial encampments, a Mayflower replica, Indian Village, and a grand march on Friday at 10 a.m. The colonial village will be open from 10 a.m. to dusk, except on July 4 when it will open after the parade (approximately (ap-proximately 11:30 a.m.) Hogle Zoo Military Appreciation Day On July 2, all military personnel, per-sonnel, veterans, and their immediate family (spouse and children under 18) will receive free admission to the zoo with a military or veteran ID. The zoo's gate hours are daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (zoo grounds are open until 6:30 p.m.) Regular admission is $8 for adults, S6 for childrenseniors, chil-drenseniors, children under 2 are free. The zoo is located at 2600 E. Sunnyside Ave.. Salt Lake City. n linn iritjmn i-i. - i mm i j " ' .' ""' " 1 - ' rf VISA 1 Fast Phone Quotes No salesman will visit you. Fast quotes from your rough measurements. Final measurement done at time of order. Visit our showroom! CALL (801 )-2 2 2-33 50 (Have your measurements ready!) 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