By TOM TURPIN
On Six Legs 

I walked into one of those big box stores the other day and the three or four aisles filled with Halloween decorations caught my eye. In one of the aisles was a large sign that read "Boo Bugs."

When I checked it out there were all kinds of evil-looking black spiders with red eyes and lots of fake spider webbing. Prominently displayed was some butterfly-wing costumes complete with a pair of antennae. There were also several types of plastic beetles in various sizes, some of which were nearly a foot in length.

So the "Boo Bug" section had lots of spiders, which aren’t insects, and some pretty butterfly costumes that didn’t seem much like Halloween to me. Beetles, though, might come a bit closer to being creatures worthy of inclusion in Halloween decorations. For starters, some beetles live rather ghoulish lives. There are burying beetles that bury the bodies of small animals such as mice and moles. The beetles and their offspring feed on the decaying carcass of the little mammals.

Some beetles are known as dung beetles because they fashion balls of mammal dung to bury as food for their offspring. The Asian lady beetle is sometimes called the Halloween beetle because it shows up about that time of year, trying to find a way into our homes as a place to spend the winter. There is a species of beetle that I’ve often thought qualified to be associated with Halloween celebrations just because of its name. That insect has the common name of deathwatch beetle and the scientific name of Xestobium rufovillosum.

This little beetle with the long name is less than one-half inch in length. It is a wood-boring beetle. The larvae of these beetles consume dry wood and in the process construct tunnels within the wood.

Adult deathwatch beetles produce a sound by tapping their heads against the wood on top of the tunnels. Biologically, that is how the insects attract mates. The sound is not very loud, and people normally only hear it under quiet conditions such as during the quiet of the night or at a bedside vigil for a dying person. Hearing the sound during a "death watch" gave the beetle its common name and contributed to speculation as to whether the sound was a predictor of the pending death. This rather macabre association of the beetle and human death has not escaped note within popular culture over the years. John Keats made note of it. So did Henry David Thoreau. Edgar Allan Poe used it in his short story "The Tell-Tale Heart"where the sound of the deathwatch beetle was mistaken for the beating of a dead man’s heart. Thomas Hood also makes reference to the deathwatch beetle in his The Haunted House with the line "The Death Watch tick’d behind the panel’d oak." Hood mentioned insects, spiders and centipedes in The Haunted House. The insects included earwigs, maggots, crickets and a moth.

The moth that Hood cited certainly should be included in any discussion of insects appropriately named for inclusion in creatures associated with Halloween. It is called the death’s head moth. This moth gets the name "death’s head" because of what resembles the marking of a human skull on its thorax. The death’s head moth is one of the sphinx moths that are also called hawk moths or hummingbird moths.

In addition to the marking of the death’s head sphinx, it is an unusual moth for two other reasons. First it can produce a squeaking sound similar to a mouse.

It also invades honey bee hives and drinks honey. Both behaviors are uncommon for moths.

Edgar Allan Poe featured a death’s head moth in his story The Sphinx. In the story the moth is perceived to be a giant monster. It is later shown to be what it really is: "The Death’s headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it wears upon its corslet."

I think that both the deathwatch beetle and the death’s head moth are appropriate insects to be included in any listing of "boo bugs" for Halloween. I bet Edgar Allan Poe would have agreed.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Tom Turpin may write to him in care of this publication.