animals: creepy crawlies

I used to believe that stepping on an ant made it rain thanks to my grandfather. After he told me this I promptly ran outside and stepped on the biggest ones I could find expecting to create a gigantic storm.

My brother and I would catch fireflies in old peanut butter jars, punch holes in the lids, and save them for the next day. When we got up the next morning, invariably the bugs would have "escaped", or so my mother told us. It wasn't until recently that my mother admitted letting them go after we went to bed. She has a heart of gold.

As a young child my grandmother told me not to pick up a praying mantis because it would spit in your eye and you would go blind. I am 38 years old and some students of mine brought in a praying mantis one day after recess and I just about lost my mind.

When I was little I asked my mom "what babies were before they were babies". She said ants. For the next few years, whenever i saw people stepping on ants, i'd scream.

When I was a kid I thought that bees could fly around the world in 4 seconds. I was so possitive of this fact that I told everyone I knew, and when told I was wrong I just thought they were ignorant. The sad thing is that I believed this for a really long time, and was quite dissapointed when I discovered the truth.

My mother told me that if you pick up an ant and turn him around he will wander around lost forever. I stopped playing with ants and believed this till well inmy adult life.

i used to believe that bugs came out of canned bug spray

I used to believe that ants in an ant colony wore colonial style clothing because the only other colonies I knew of at the time were the American ones.

when i was younger i thought ants had tongues. i always pictured them sticking their tongues out at me.

I used to believe that flea markets were a place people sold fleas, or the place was infested with fleas

When I was little I ALWAYS slept on my side and pressed my ear into my pillow to protect my ear from earwigs crawling in it. On the other ear I placed a stuffed animal or covered my head with the blankets.

A close friend of mine grew up thinking that crane flies were just male mosquitoes (and that all actual mosquitoes were thus the females). This was apparently a widespread misconception where she grew up!

I read a book about worms and misread the word tape as tap. I then thought that taps had worms living in them and had to look up the tap before I turned it on.

I used to believe that dung beetles were made out of poo!

When I was about eight I used to think that if you touched bug juice (insect blood), you would turn into a bug. I didn't know what it looked like back then, so I was kinda paranoid about it and avoiding everything that even looked vaguely like it even if it was just spilled drink turned dark from fading into fabric on the furniture or something.

Just this moment I learned that earwigs do not go into your ears, i'm twenty-four.