BUGS, EDUCATION, AND A $40,000 HEIST

While the Insectarium became known as the go-to place to see and learn about bugs in Philly, it’s rooted in the opposite — extermination. Around the mid-1970s, creator Steve Kanya, then still working for the Philadelphia Police Department, was looking for a way to “supplement his police officer’s salary,” according to a 1997 Inquirer report, and began moonlighting in the pest control business. That effort would evolve into Steve’s Bug Off Exterminating Co., the Insectarium’s precursor.

Why extermination? Was Kanya a big insect buff as a kid, or a local cop who missed his calling as an entomologist? Well, not really.

“I picked up a book, 100 Different Businesses to Start, and exterminating was one of them,” Kanya, who grew up in Mayfair, told The Inquirer in 1993. “I didn’t give it too much thought.”

From there, Kanya got started treating apartments he owned, as well as his mother’s and grandmother’s homes before developing a customer base. He built the business working out of a 1964 Ford Falcon, and went to school studying insects and entomology at night.

Ultimately, Kanya would come to open a brick-and-mortar base for Steve’s Bug Off in the city’s Holmesburg section at 8046 Frankford Ave. — the future site of the Insectarium.

A few years after opening, Kanya and co. start displaying preserved — and later, live — insects in the front window of Steve’s Bug Off. That practice, Kanya told in The Inquirer in 1993, was known as their “Catch of the Day” — essentially an effort to show off “whatever the guys brought in that day,” he said.

You know, like “live rats, squirrels, roaches” and other types of vermin the Steve’s Bug Off technicians got their hands on.

“I was working late one night and I noticed cars pulling up and people getting out and parents taking their children to look in the window,” Kanya said in 1997. “And I thought, ‘Someday, I’m going to open a museum.’”

The Insectarium officially opened its doors on Jan. 15, 1992 in about 6,000 square feet of space on the two floors above the offices of Steve’s Bug Off. Admission on opening day: $2.85.

And at an estimated cost of $150,000 to open, the Insectarium came out swinging. Attractions at its debut included a scale that weighed kids in bugs (one kid, for example, weighed as much as 474,000 lady bugs, or 7 million fruit flies), a working beehive, an ant farm, scorpions, tarantulas, flies hatching from pupae, mounted bugs and butterflies, bug-themed educational games, and, of course, a gift shop. But the pièce de resistance was a massive display of thousands of cockroaches in a mocked up, back-to-back kitchen and bathroom.

The Insectarium continued to grow its offerings, adding everything from a “Bugs on Wheels” program that would allow mobile demonstrations for classrooms to bug-themed birthday party packages. And there were plenty of opportunities to actually eat some bugs with the Insectarium’s “Saturday Bug Brunches” and other bug tastings that included cooked-up crickets, mealworms, and waxworms.

Kanya also became something of a local celebrity, having given an estimated 300 radio interviews from as far away as Hawaii since opening the Insectarium. One 1994 Inquirer writeup even called the Insectarium crew the “local unchallenged experts” on bugs.”

While the rest of the world focused in on the 1998 Winter Olympics, the Insectarium debuted its first-ever Bug Olympics.

Held on Saturday afternoons throughout February, the Bug Olympics staged a number of contests between actual insects, and allowed visitors to “compare their strength and speed against various insects.” That last one is a tough proposition, considering ants can lift between 10 and 50 times their own body weight.

The event’s kickoff contest: a “Race Between the Roaches,” which pitted Madagascar hissing cockroaches against American cockroaches in a footrace.

The Daily News announces a contest to name the ongoing federal corruption probe of City Hall, which began after a secret recording device (AKA a bug) was discovered in then-Mayor John Street’s office. The prize for first place: “A free home extermination from Steve’s Bug-Off who will sweep your home for bugs, mice, raccoons, whatever your problem. Or — for those with critter-free homes — six tickets to Steve’s famous insectarium.”

The Insectarium is contracted to breed up to 4,000 roaches for Haunted Poe, a live haunted house with 13 spooky rooms themed after the writings of Edgar Allan Poe in South Philly. Bred for a cost of $500, the roaches were reportedly displayed in a Pit and the Pendulum-themed corridor at the attraction.

The Mayfair Monarch Project, a “brainchild” of Kanya, aimed to “increase the number of monarch butterflies in North America, and spruce up the corridor between Mayfair and Holmesburg,” according to an Inquirer report. News of the project comes ahead of a planned opening of a Butterfly Rainforest Pavilion at the Insectarium, which is set to be located in an 8,000 square foot warehouse behind the existing business.

The monarch butterfly population had been declining because milkweed plants — the species’ main food source — were dying off due to the increasing use of herbicides and corporate farming, John Cambridge, then the Insectarium’s director of operations, told The Inquirer. In response, and in preparation for the butterfly pavilion, the Insectarium began growing thousands of milkweed plants, and civic groups in Tacony, Wissinoming, Mayfair, and Holmesburg began encouraging residents to do so, too.

After a year of construction, Kanya (now chairman of the Insectarium’s board of directors) and Cambridge (now CEO) unveil not only the butterfly pavilion, but a “top-to-bottom renovation of the Insectarium” and an update to its exhibits and educational materials. Wlodek Lapkiewicz, a name that will become important when you watch the series, is named as the museum’s living colonies director.

The butterfly pavilion, though, is the real story. At about 7,000 square feet, it’s reportedly one of the largest in the country, and offered visitors the chance to “mingle with thousands of exotic butterfly species” while wandering through a 40-foot tunnel of live moss and watching newly metamorphosed butterflies emerge from their chrysalises.

All is lost. In a surprisingly weird burglary, an estimated 7,000 insects, lizards, and other species go missing at the Insectarium. Cambridge estimated the value of the loss at about $40,000, and suspected that most of the creatures are headed for resale to collectors on the black market. And, in a particularly dramatic flourish, Cambridge said that he also found “blue employee uniforms hanging from knives that had been thrust into a wall.”

Some creatures, Cambridge said, appeared to be missing as early as Aug. 21, 2018, but he wasn’t immediately sure if anything was amiss because many insects, scorpions, and other specimens were often moved between the exhibit space and breeding colonies, or were taken out of the building for traveling educational shows.

After checking security cameras, though, Cambridge said he saw employees carrying out bugs and lizards in plastic totes and boxes over the course of several days. Still, he waited a day to contact police and instead first approached the employees to ask them to return the stolen animals. Interestingly, Cambridge reportedly also waited because some of the creatures “did not belong to the museum, but were being help temporarily at the request of federal authorities” who had seized them on the suspicion that they had been illegally imported. Cops, meanwhile, suspected it was an inside job.

In response to the theft, Cambridge told The Inquirer that he planned to shut down the second and third floors of the Insectarium, but keep the butterfly pavilion and gift shop open. It would fully reopen in November of 2018.

An Inquirer report notes that police have “no updates regarding” the Insectarium heist. That’s still apparently true to this day, as no one has been implicated in the crime.

Feldman’s Bug Out makes its streaming premiere on IMDb TV.