The Bug Stops Here

It’s Friday, so it must be Friday lite…

When you’re hosting a birthday party for an entomologist, you have to think “bugs.”

That’s the rule. It’s written right there in the Entomological Society of America’s official guidebook, Chapter 10, Page 387, Line 38.

(OK, I made that up.)

When a group of us from the UC Davis Department of Entomology hosted a party today for department chair Lynn Kimsey (in honor of her Feb. 1 birthday), the cake featured a praying mantis, an ant, a beetle, a grasshopper, a wasp, scores of bees, and…er…a cockroach.

Well, it was only ONE cockroach.

Which, I admit, was probably one cockroach too many.

But hey, it was  plastic.

Which is what all cockroaches should be.

Fantasy Cakes and Fine Pastries, Vacaville, outdid themselves. The ant emerging from the ant hill and the praying mantis, complete with dinner companion, scored.  

The buggy cake drew  all “oohs” and “ahs.”

Except for one “yecch.”

That was for the cockroach.

Lynn, who chairs the Bohart Museum of Entomology, home of seven million specimens, is surrounded by insects all day, so she was in her comfort zone.

Administrative assistant Nancy Dullum cut the cake, carefully slicing around the little critters.

“That’s the first cake I’ve cut,” she said, “with bugs on it.”

Last year when I was attempting to order a cake at an area bakery for UC Davis  forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey (husband of Lynn), I requested some blow flies.  

 “You want, what?” the baker said. “Blow flies? Blow flies?  You got to be kidding. Anyhow, we’re fresh out of blow flies. No blow flies today.”

Good thing I didn’t ask for maggots.