cover image Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects

Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects

. Chronicle Books, $24.95 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-8118-3789-7

In this coffeetable-sized volume, Glausiusz, a senior editor at Discover magazine, explores the ways in which humans come into everyday contact with insects. The striking colorized photographs, taken by German photographer Steger using a SEM (scanning electron microscope), make one simultaneously wince and gaze in awe as each image displays insects much larger than life. As Glausiusz writes in her introduction,""Without insects and mites to recycle it, all the waste the we and other animals produce... would pile up to colossal heights."" In prose almost as graphic as the photos themselves, she then describes the common bedbug, which procreates by""traumatic insemination,"" during which the""lusty"" male stabs the female in the abdomen with his copulatory organ, the paramere. There are many photos not taken with the SEM, such as a close-up of a woman drawing blood with a syringe from a thumb-size castniid moth larva. But Glausiuz and Steger takes readers to the next intriguing level of the human-insect relationship as they explore such delicacies as a chocolate-covered Locusta migratoria (shown in a photo worthy of most high-end cookbooks), prepared by a Berlin chef.