[Community Involvement] You Want Me To Speak Where?

According to Dr. Rebecca Baldwin, assistant professor, University of Florida Entomology & Nematology Department, education and outreach events have become an important part of the pest control industry. But before planning the perfect appearance, there are some questions that need to be addressed.

“What is your take home at the end of the day when you do these?” she asked. “Do you just want to entertain the folks? Do you want to educate the folks, or is it just an advertising opportunity?” A skillfully planned presentation can accomplish all of the above.
 

Speak Where?

The key to a successful presentation is knowing your audience, so it’s important to plan a presentation based on the interests and capabilities of each particular group.

Headed to an elementary school? Baldwin suggests planning hands-on activities and changing them every 10 minutes to keep interest and excitement levels high.

According to Baldwin, it’s crucial to start the presentation strong, especially with kids. Quiet them down by adapting the traditional “clap if you can hear me” concept to “show me your antennae if you’re listening.” Once each child’s finger antennae are on top of their heads, you have their attention.

Try sparking their awareness before even setting foot in the classroom by sending in a mystery bug that they may not have encountered before. Ask the teacher to record the class’ observations and guesses about the identity of the insect daily, and their interest will be piqued long before any presentation. Then, once it’s time to present, the objective is to be engaging.

“For elementary age kids, hands-on activities work the best,” said Baldwin. “They really like having projects to do.”

With less than a $5 investment, anyone can plan a project that will entertain and educate hundreds of students. One of these easy and inexpensive ideas is creating pasta life cycles, made from paper plate habitats, rice or orzo eggs, rotini larvae, shell pupas, and bowtie wings.

“You can have them glue it to the plate,” said Baldwin. “They can paint it, they can color it, even if you just have markers.” Students can even use markers and paint to color in the habitat for the specific insect in that day’s lesson plan.
 

Stick to the Plan.

Baldwin said teachers often welcome pest control professionals into the classroom because their presentations dovetail with their lesson plans.

“Something to consider is meeting the science objectives for the classroom,” said Baldwin. “If you’re going into the schools, if you think about the curriculum, and the types of objectives they have, insects fit into a lot of those objectives.”

Although a pest control professional’s presentation can cover the educational objectives of an insect unit, they have some room to step outside the box.

“Teachers always have butterflies in their lesson plans,” said Baldwin. “So kids know all about butterflies, but they don’t know about the other insects. If you talk about metamorphosis, bring it back to bees, moths, beetles.”
 

Move It!

Another fun and entertaining option is to get the kids up and moving. Make an insect mealtime relay race for the children. Students are divided into two teams, and then the students on each team are assigned a bug. The goal is to eat the food placed in front of them the way they would if they woke up as that bug.

Grasshoppers need to chew their Cheerios without hands, flies need to sponge water from one cup to another, butterflies siphon their tropical fruit Gatorade, and the stink bug, mosquito or bed bug sucks juice out of a juice bag with a piercing, sucking straw.

Baldwin said the perfect prize for the winning team is Mexican jumping beans, which can be found at dollar stores across the country. Just don’t forget to explain to the students that there is a larvae living inside the bean.

An exercise in pollination is also a way to engage young students. Put a different colored hard candy in the bottom of paper bags, and then fill them up with cheese puffs. Each student is a different insect that needs a certain color of flower to pollinate. They seek the correct flower color to gain access to the “nectar.” They can move around the room and sift through the cheese puffs until they find the nectar they need.

“In order to get to the nectar they need to reach through all those cheese puffs, and what do you think is going to happen to their hand when they reach in the bag?” asked Baldwin. They will be spreading cheese puff pollen in no time.
 

Show on the Road.

The classroom isn’t the only place for an interactive insect lesson. “Did you realize that Boy Scouts can actually earn a merit badge for insects?” asked Baldwin. “One of their objectives is to talk about life cycles, so if you can talk about insect life cycles and help them go out and search for an insect life cycle, then they can earn their merit badge.”

Baldwin said that 3D bug puzzles are another great hands-on activity for Boy Scouts in particular. They are also a project you can bring into a local library.

“If you ever get invitations to work with the library, the librarian will pull every insect book in the library and put it on a cart so they will be available for the children that day,” said Baldwin.

She said that younger children especially love pop-up books or stories with sound effects and songs. “Music is great, and you can use YouTube to your advantage,” she said.

Cricket chocolate chip cookies, bee or butterfly sugar cookies, buggy bookmarks branded with your logo and a Cornell drawer filled with real bugs are the perfect complement to any insect story.

Pest control professionals can even make their presentation at a child’s birthday party. Baldwin suggests giving each partygoer a T-shirt with your company’s logo and outfitting the birthday boy or girl in a special colored shirt that says, “I touched a bug!”
 

Trusty Bug Box.

No matter where the presentation takes place, Baldwin never works with children without her trusty bug box. It’s filled with various everyday objects that are surefire ways to entice the interest of little ones.

Some of her favorites are household items that mimic the eating mechanisms of bugs children encounter daily. A party horn represents the siphoning butterfly, pliers demonstrate the chewing mouthparts of beetles and cockroaches, sponges show how houseflies eat their liquid food and a needleless syringe or a juice box straw that is sharp on one end is the same as the piercing, sucking motion of mosquitoes and bed bugs.

Baldwin also brings along plastic models of insect life cycles, which she said are good for small groups. She finds these as well as insect eye glasses online at Insect Lore.

“You can have these and make the kids look like an insect. They have compound eye lenses that flip down, and here you can talk about the antennae, you can talk about how insects see, their environment, how they have mandibles, you can talk about mouthparts,” she said.

Although plastic bug models make a valuable teaching tool, Baldwin warns against filling a bug box with big plastic bug containers found online. Oftentimes these bulk packages include arachnids, rodents and even lizards. For those that make this mistake, she suggests going through the box with the students and asking which plastic pieces are in fact insects, and then letting each child take one home as a souvenir.
 

Older Audiences.

Presenting to a group of middle school or high school students is a little different from wowing an elementary school classroom.

“Middle school students like to make things,” said Baldwin, who suggests activities like building bugs with marshmallow thoraxes and pretzel legs.

But not every lesson needs to consist of coloring and sweets. As an audience gets older and more mature, try bringing techniques that pest control professionals use every day in the field to the classroom. Baldwin said an easy example is prebaiting.

“So you’ll pull out an index card, put a little drop of honey on it, put some kind of protein like a hot dog on it and see what the ants are attracted to so you know what kind of bait to use,” said Baldwin. “You can do that with the children. Put out an index card and have them watch. How long does it take the scout to find the index card? How long does the scout stay and feed? How long does it take the scout to recruit back to the index card?”

Class time isn’t the only time to meet with middle and high school students. Visit a career day or job fair and show the students the business and communication side of pest control that people rarely see. Baldwin said that many of these students don’t realize what goes into being a pest control professional, or the money making potential in the industry.
 

Straight to Business.

Pest control professionals are also taking their message directly to potential customers by interacting with homeowners associations and tabling at trade shows.

Need a way to break into a new community? Try planning a ladybug release with a local homeowner’s association. Place a bulk order of ladybugs, and have the children in a nearby development help release them.

“You’re making contacts with the parents, you’re doing something beneficial with the insects and then you can talk about the biology,” said Baldwin. “You can bring using something beneficial back around to talking about something that would actually be profitable for you.”

Another place some pest control professionals may be hesitant to present at are parks and Earth Day events. But don’t discount these locales — there could be big rewards for a business here.

“It makes pest control companies feel a little uncomfortable when you have this Earth Day event and everybody is thinking about the environment, and you get a lot of questions about pesticides and how do you feel about using pesticides,” Baldwin said. “You can go out and educate the public about how important it is that we are out there to protect their home and we’re there to protect their health and to protect their animals’ health. It gives you a nice opportunity to share your knowledge with other people.”
 

Stand Out in the Crowd.

According to Baldwin, another obvious way to spread knowledge about pest control to an adult audience is tabling at home and garden shows. How can you stand out from the hundreds of other exhibitors? Not everyone needs a 30-foot inflatable bug at their table; calling upon the most creative people in a company can also draw a crowd.

“Most every company has somebody that has this creativity,” said Baldwin. And that person has the potential to bring anything from cricket cookies to a handmade cockroach costume to the table.

Baldwin suggests buying some crickets from a local pet store, feeding them wheat for a few days to clean out their system, freezing them and rolling off their extra wings and limbs, and then serving them with chocolate as cricket fondue. The frozen insects can also be ground into cricket flour for baking.

“That’s a fun activity, and there’s probably someone in your office that would really like to experiment with some recipes,” she said.

If there isn’t a chef in the office, anything with the additive carmine will suffice. According to Baldwin, carmine (or carmine acid) is the red coloring found in lipsticks and candies, and it comes from scale insects.

“Next time you’re in the grocery store and you’re waiting in line for the person ahead of you, start looking at the candy aisle,” she said. “Pick up every kind of candy to look at the ingredients and see if you can find that word carmine; it’s usually one of the last ingredients where they have color additives.”

For those with a higher budget that allows for more than grocery store candy, there are a plethora of insect products that can be found online, including Chapul cricket bars, which were featured on the popular television show Shark Tank. Baldwin said snacks like these are the perfect introduction to the importance of insects in our food supply.
 

Dress the Part.

Another option is a costume. Costumes range from extravagant roach costumes purchased on Amazon, to a bed bug costume made out of everyday materials like a funnel, wire, paper, paint and tape. The cost isn’t what’s important; the outfit just needs to make an impression.

“That’s a good photo opportunity,” said Baldwin. “Put your logo on a costume, have a nametag that says, ‘Hi, I’m a bed bug,’ and then have people come and take pictures with their cell phones. Have them post it to social media and that gets your name out there.”

Regionally specific fact or fiction sheets are also a way to engage potential customers. When Baldwin makes these, she selects some of the most common pest-related myths applicable to an area and lists them on the front of the sheet. Individuals can grab a sheet, make their guesses and then flip the sheet over to see the myths dispelled.

“See whatever area of the world or the country that you’re from, think about those myths, think about those questions that you often get and see if you can come up with a fact or fiction, something that would give you talking points when you go to an event,” she said. “Even if it’s a home show, people will be attracted to your table and then you can talk about things that are on there.”
 

It's a Bug's Life.

Although these tips are all great for engaging, nothing draws an individual’s interest quite like actual insects.

Baldwin said that slow-moving bess beetles are great for tabling and activities for many of the same reasons that make them a popular extra in TV shows and movies. They’re slow moving, big and fairly vocal.

Click beetles are also a bug that can be collected right outside and taken to a tradeshow. “You can hold the click beetle in your hand and have it flip over,” she said.

Other options include mimicking the pheromones in natural termite trails with live termites and wet ink or creating maggot art with the wiggly critters. Since they love goo, they don’t mind being dipped in paint. Just set them on paper, have them wiggle around to create eco art, and then wash them off so they can complete their development, said Baldwin.

Then there are the “wow” bugs, such as hissing cockroaches and tarantulas. Baldwin stressed that those who plan to include these bugs in their presentations need to be mindful of factors like locations where they are illegal to purchase, as well as the health and safety of the bug.

“If you have something that they can handle or you have the cockroaches that you take out, get some stickers made with your company name and that gives someone a badge of honor, saying that they touched that insect,” Baldwin said. “Whatever children you have, get some stickers made. Kids will do anything for a sticker, right?”

But the bugs don’t even have to be alive to impress. Buy some Riker mounts online or from a craft store and present anything from honeybee hives to a scorpion’s exoskeleton.

Another creative way to display dead bugs is to glue bed bugs onto a doll bed, along with a Petri dish of live ones on the end of the table. “Have them go and do an inspection,” said Baldwin. “What are they looking for?”
 

To the Point.

No matter what presentation tools work for a specific company, it is possible to reach new customers through unconventional and creative means. The most important part? Bringing an audience back to the original point.

“You’ve got to have your talking points, you have to bring things back around to whatever point you’re trying to make,” said Baldwin.

About the author: Laura Straub is a Cleveland-based freelancer.