A highlight of each year's event is the Insect Deli, where fairgoers get their chance to bite back by sampling cuisine made with insects. "Last year, a reporter watched people eat for about 20 minutes," Maryann Frazier recalls. "Finally he said to me, 'I don't understand this. People are waiting in line to eat an insect. If they found one in their food at a restaurant, they'd demand their money back and more.' We try to show people that it's okay to eat insects. They're not dirty, they're a source of protein, and people in several countries eat them as a regular part of their diet.

"Our goal is to make as many connections as possible between the insect world and people's lives," says Frazier. The sign at one display, for example, where visitors listen to recordings of a katydid, cicada, field cricket, and tree cricket, reads, "A male cicada can't use a telephone to ask his girlfriend for a date. Instead, he finds a tall tree and calls her by rapidly bending and unbending a special skeletal structure on his abdomen called a tymbal. These calls can be heard a quarter of a mile away."

"Every exhibit includes very simple written material that parents can read quickly," says research associate Heidi Appel. "It creates an enormous amount of exchange between parents and their children, and that's exactly what we want. Parents facilitate their kids' learning, and in the process they also learn themselves."

Bug Camp for Kids campers prepare "chocolate chirpies," or chocolate- covered crickets, to take home and share with their families.

"Insects are a great educational tool for people of all ages," agrees Frazier. "They're readily available, abundant, and easy to handle and keep. They also display almost every trait exhibited by other members of the animal kingdom, including predator-prey relationships, social behaviors, parasitism, and mutual interdependencies. And kids really like their amazing variety of unusual attributes." Some ant species, for example, can carry 50 times their own weight with their mouth parts, and hissing cockroaches, one of Frazier's favorite teaching insects, force air through a membrane to make a hissing sound when they are touched or confronted with a potential threat–such as an inquisitive child's finger. Insects also are the only creatures known to undergo the process of metamorphosis. "The insect world is almost like the cantina in the Star Wars movies, where the strangest creatures are," she says. "Only it's right in your own backyard, if you take the time to look."