I accidentally found a great way to make kids into natural history/entomology during summer holidays.

All you need is a catch-net, Chinery’s Insect of European insects book (or any other general insect book for your region) and a swimming pool.

Kids catch drowned insects in the pool with the net (quite frequent drownings in our case*, I have to say, and I wonder how high are the death rates caused by swimming pools globally!). Collecting that way is already quite fun. Most bugs are still alive and we let them dry gently. It’s quite rewarding to see them fly away after a couple of minutes, which is wonderful because kids are now bug-rescuers, not bug-killers! Additionally, wet bugs are slow and let you see them and try to id them (i.e. at least to family or genus). So this is a kill free, easy way to see bugs

If you want the scientific bonus, we also recorded the frequency of each species, time of the day and if it was dead of alive. You can then explore the data. We found 52 specimens of 22 morphospecies. Of the several insect groups recorded (wasps, bees, ants, flies, beetles, moths, harvestmen (opiliones), heteropterans, milipids, …), the most numerous were wasps. Interestingly, among the two most common species, Polistes has higher mortality rates (4 out of 8 ;50%) than Vespula (3 out of 9; 33%). The coolest insect was probably the stick bug!

*If not much insects fall in the pool, open the filter and you should find dozens of mostly dead bodies.