One two three four five six. So many times a hornet stuck in Aglaia’s chest when she was on holiday in Austria at the age of seventeen. The giant wasp must have been furious, and especially scared, driven into a corner: for months no one had been in the cottage and suddenly that wonderful peace was rudely disturbed by Aglaia, her boyfriend at the time and her parents-in-law, who owned the cottage. There had been a whole nest full of hornets when they opened the door.
She felt a little dizzy, the place where she had been stabbed hurt, and she looked pale. paler. Even paler. Her hands swelled up, they got fat, and fatter, ‘and then I fell away’. She smiles when she tells it – it’s been so long, and it ended well. She got lucky. A hornet on her chest, yes, but also: an angel on her shoulder.
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In great haste, Aglaia was taken to the hospital. An anaphylactic shock was the diagnosis, and also the reason that she was “total of the world” for a few hours, in a coma. Her organs appeared to have fallen out one by one. “That goes on until your heart stops,” Aglaia says. “You shouldn’t have come in five minutes late,” the doctor had said.
She turned out to be allergic to the hornet’s venom. “I used to have thick ankles when I ran with my bare feet through a field. I grew up in the east of the Netherlands, where there is a lot of greenery, and I thought: those thick ankles, that’s apparently what you hear when you run through the meadow. . Little did I know that it was because of insects.”
She first felt it while still in Austria, a few weeks after the bite. Fear. She was in the garden. Heard buzz. honeybees. Can sting, but only do so when they feel extremely threatened – they sacrifice themselves for the rest of the population, because they die from a sting. “It was really nothing to worry about, and then my heart was in my throat, sweat poured down my forehead and I felt short of breath. From that moment on I was terrified of wasps. Really to the point of panic.”
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Yet she is now standing here in the Naturalis research institute and natural history museum. They can be found all around her, insects, with their legs spread, feelers (if they have any) clearly visible. Although they are dead, they are shown on a large screen for the museum visitors.
Now on the screen: a beetle, a grassland capon that suddenly appears very hairy from close up. It is a ladybug without dots and much smaller than the one you always see. Aglaia is the one who set up the animal, with a very thin brush she stuck the dead insect on a piece of cardboard.
“If you had told me this thirty years ago? I would have laughed right in your face.”
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For years she preferred to live indoors. Bedroom windows always closed. When she did venture out on the terrace, she looked around continuously and ran away from everything that flew. She laughs: “It must have looked moronic.” She drove a car with the windows closed, even if the sparrows fell from the roof because of the heat, even if she had no air conditioning.
And so Aglaia was, as it were, ‘hostage’ for years by everything that flew, buzzed, crawled, pricked. “And by running away from them, or avoiding them like the plague, I was rewarded every time in my avoidance urge: because as soon as I ran away from such an insect, I felt better. My heart rate went down again, I got my breathing under control.”
Fear is a fast-growing monster. She muddled with that monster for fifteen years – now you can call it a phobia. Until, she was now thirty, she once sat in her parked car and saw a fly flying right in front of her. She threw open the door, threw herself out of the car, ran, tripped, pants broken, knees broken, the size full. “This could no longer be the case. I had fled from a fly.”
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Face her fear. That was the plan. But in dead form. So Aglaia went to Naturalis. She points around. “This is the place where countless insects are kept, stuffed, dead. But when I saw a dead hornet up close, it didn’t make me very hot or cold. Over the years it had been stripped of its bright red-orange color, and it looked a little brittle. And my fear of live insects remained.”
Plan B: gain knowledge. Read. To learn. She wrote novels and short stories, so she was always interested in language. She bought a booklet with a big wasp on the front – but didn’t dare touch it. “Fortunately, there were also books without pictures of wasps.”
And then there came a moment when Aglaia saw a wasp queen sitting on a bush next to her front door. Drinking honeydew, she knew, because she had read that. Honeydew is aphid droppings that cause a transparent layer on plants, she knew, because that too had been lying there. “Then I ran in. To grab my camera to take a picture.”
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Her insect photos got better, the fears did not last, even when she zoomed in on the animal with her lens, as if it were a microscope. “It helped me so much that I understood what they were doing. I now knew: a wasp won’t hurt me if I don’t move. They mainly react to moving images, so if I sit still, I’m nothing more to them than a vague background.”
the snaps she shared on Twitter, accompanied by informative texts. She decided to write more about insects, conducted field research in gardens and in nature reserves and became a guest researcher at Naturalis.
She went for field research to the dense jungle of Borneo and traveled through The Gambia and Senegal, sleeping in huts and returning with tightly closed jars in her backpack with a precious loot: six new stem-eyed flies. “Those are bizarre beasts,” she says, gesturing wildly. “So they have eyes on stalks, really fascinating.”
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She catches the insects with a special safety net and a jar. “The real little ones you suck up with your mouth with a special tube with a filter.” Grinning: “That’s why I found out that rove beetles taste bad. Because a trapped insect had bitten that filter of the tube. So I got it in my mouth.”
Bad taste: yes. But further? Insects are not dirty, but fascinating. Not scary, but special. No monsters, no, earwigs are very caring mothers, cockroaches are not bastards because they prefer to eat fruit, bees are fantastic relatives, they sacrifice themselves when threatened for their people and die when they sting the enemy.
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Aglaia is no longer allergic, but that took a few years. “My environment didn’t like that I was busy with insects when they could kill me.” Even though she always carried an epipen with her, with which she, or her fellow field researchers, could immediately inject life-saving adrenaline.
“I’ve never been stung by a wasp again, so I thought: I’m not allergic anymore. I’ve outgrown it.” But when she had that tested at the GP with a tiny bit of poison: bam.
Every week a little bit more poison was injected into her body in the allergology department of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. There was a physical reaction every time. It made her especially drowsy, and sometimes she missed a subway on the way back. “The total treatment lasts five years, I still have to get an injection every month for two years, but I am no longer sensitive. The epipen no longer needs to be taken when I go out.”
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The insects that Aglaia and her colleagues find are viewed, registered and labeled (location, date, insect type and name of finder). They all do that themselves, Aglaia calls it monks’ work, the ants and the smallest beetles, fruit flies, also have to be set up, but beautiful monks’ work.
She points to the microscope. “Look, the stalk-eyed fly is now under it, from Senegal.” The immensely broad head of the beast, with an eye and a small antenna on either side of the stalks, is clearly visible. “This is really fat.”
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The insects are killed by the researchers, often with ethyl acetate, a colorless liquid, as soon as they are in the jar or tube, so that they do not destroy themselves or panic. “It feels very double,” says Aglaia. “I used to have to kill every insect because I thought they were scary, now they have to die because I think they are so beautiful.”
You can hardly see a living insect up close. Too small, too fast. “And sometimes you have to take them apart to see what type they are among the beetles, or the gadflies. You have all kinds of beetle species that are immensely similar, of the rove beetles there are already 1100 species, and they are almost all black or dark brown and 3 millimeters small. Only their genitals are all different. And insects have nerves. It is pathetic to dissect them while they are still alive.” She grimaces.
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Her home is also teeming with insects, some of them dead, in her freezer – a special freezer had to be made for that, putting those insects next to the frozen vegetables was going a bit too far. Aglaia counts on her fingers for a moment. “I now have a tank of live cockroaches. I have three tanks of beetles and larvae – and I’m sure there is also a larva of a parasitic west living in the larvae of the beetle.”
Preparation and registration is important, they say. “We need to know how the insects are doing, all over the world. It tells us something about the consequences of global warming, nitrogen emissions.”
“Insects are important for birds, for fish, as food. They eat our organic waste, without shit flies we would be up to our ears in manure and without beetles and flies cadavers would not be cleaned up.”
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Knowledge instead of fear. She grants that to people who still have an unstoppable urge to smash everything that flies, crawls or buzzes – just like she used to have. “I think insects are too small to see their beauty. But really, think about it, zoom in on them. Look how ants teach each other the way, first you see them walking behind each other, and then alone . Fascinating.”
Last year her book Insects was published, about how smart some insects are, how sweet, caring, funny, bizarre, fascinating. Her own favorite? Difficult to choose, but still: the hornet. It nearly killed her, but then gave her an exciting life, full of travel, new discoveries in jungles, lectures at home and abroad, museum tours and preparations.
Sometimes she feels a certain uneasiness when she thinks of all those species that are still there and still flying or crawling around undiscovered. But it also has something beautiful. For Aglaia knows for sure: as long as she lives, she will not be bored.
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