A Bug's Life: Behind the Scenes

Pixar's A Bug's Life filled my innocent childhood mind with the naive notion that bugs lived a charmed life and were amiable, beautiful and diverse beings on this earth. Disney's Earth segment on insects, however, revealed the dark, behind-the-scenes reality.

Lies!

By the end of the torturous episode, I couldn't decide which would be the worst insect life to live. I concluded that it all depends what gender you are as that seems to be the driving force behind whether or not your life sucks. Unless you are a Dawson's bee, in which case neither males nor females seem to escape a horrendous fate. More on that shortly.

The first charming segment of the nature special focused on a certain subspecies of walking stick insect, which was one of the most charming characters from A Bug's Life. In reality, however, they are more like the deadbeat dads appearing on the Maury Povich show. To reach a female and get their reproduction on, male stick bugs must scale tree trunks and take on enemy male challengers on the way by fighting to the death. The winner gets it on with the female at the top of the tree and then throws her off of the trunk to her death at the base of the tree. Real nice end to a date, and a great reward for putting out. Keep your knickers on next time, female stick bug.

In the case of the Japanese red beetle, motherhood is synonymous with Hell. Mothers have a whole brood of brats who are the epitome of picky. They will only eat the juice of a perfectly ripe, extremely rare exotic fruit, so their mother ventures out, probes each fruit she encounters to determine its ripeness, and then brings it back to her ungrateful offspring. If she takes too long, the babies literally ditch her and go hang out with a different mommy bug. Once they are old enough to leave the roost, they kill their mother/foster mother and eat her. You can't beat the attitude out of those little nightmares with Super Nanny.

These kids should really be put up for adoption

The worst for both genders, as previously mentioned, is most likely a life as a Dawson's bees. The males literally wait to gang rape the females that hatch underground as she first emerges from the earth. Such a picturesque first vision of the world- a bunch of nasty men ready to de-flower you. As they clamor to tackle the lady bee, the men fight to the death to the point where they completely kill each other off and only one alpha male remains. In their squabbles, they even dismember some emerging females by accident. As Oprah, the narrator says, the female bees become "collateral damage." Seems a little darker than Pixar led me to believe as a child...

Retreat, female Dawson's bee!!