From time to time, our local NPR affiliate, WILL AM 580, invites me to be a guest on a phone-in show called Focus 580. Usually, I’m asked in early spring, when pest insects are starting to wreak havoc in gardens and listener interest is high. This year, though, I was invited to appear on February 14, to field calls for Valentine’s Day. I speak to a lot of different groups and I always try to pitch the talk to fit their interests—medicinal insects for the Biomedical Careers Program at Rutgers University-Piscataway, Bugs in the Bible for the Sinai Temple Adult Education group, insects as herb fanciers for the Urbana Herb Club, insects on pets for the Eastern Illinois Veterinary Medical Association, aquatic insects for the Izaak Walton League State Convention, edible insects for the Champaign Noon Kiwanis, and so on. Putting together insects and romantic love, though, was kind of a challenge. What with sexual cannibalism, nuptial gifts of dead flies, traumatic insemination, copulatory plugs and the like, insect courtship and mating aren’t really good models for their human counterparts. As far as I knew, the only link between insects and Valentine’s Day is the fact that greeting-card companies like to use insects on Valentine’s Day, usually as visual accompaniment to bad puns (e.g., “Bee my honey”). So, in preparation for the program, I delved into the history of Valentine’s Day cards, in the hope of tracking down when insects first made an appearance. As far as I could determine, insects on cards date back only to the 19th century, when mass production of commercial cards began. At that point, flowers were already a popular medium for conveying romantic sentiments. By the 18th century, Europeans were sending each other romantic messages via symbolic flowers, a practice that reached new heights in the 19th century with such publications as Le Langage des Fleurs, written by Louise Cortambert under the pseudonym Madame Charlotte de LaTour. According to the 1834 English version (London: Saunders and Otley), the acacia symbolized “platonic love,” the carnation “pure and ardent love,” the myrtle “love,” heliotrope “I love you,” foulsa-patte “humble and unfortunate love,” honeysuckle “ties of love,” the lilac “the first emotions of love,” the linden “conjugal love,” moss “maternal love,” the moss-rose “voluptuous love,” the pipe-tree “fraternal love,” the tulip a “declaration of love,” the white and red rose “violent love,” and the rose bud “a heart ignorant of love.” So flowers transitioned naturally to mass-produced greeting cards. Insects appeared intermittently on these cards, mostly to amplify the naturalistic setting, but there was a singular arthropod innovation in the Victorian Valentine business around this time. By the 1840s, mechanical cards with moving parts became popular and among the most popular were the spiral-cut cards known as “cobweb Valentines” (http://tinyurl. com/6shct6q). These came equipped with a thread that could be lifted up to expand the spiral into a three-dimensional web-like maze that revealed a picture or message hitherto concealed. The concealed picture was often a miniature image of a young boy or girl, but the Virginia Historical Society has in its collection a Victorian-era cobweb Valentine that is biologically more appropriate: the cobweb contains a butterfly trapped within ( ). By the turn of the century, insects had broadened their Valentine’s Day appeal, even featuring in what were called “VinBee my Valentine? BuzzwordS
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Oct 31, 2014
Jian-Lin Sun + 3
Open Access