Bugs, the Close Up and Personal Way

Different insect groups--from wasps to flies to fleas--are featured each week in the Insectary at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

As visitors look on, the four eyes of a longhorn beetle or the suction cup-like feet of a male diving beetle appear in huge detail on a monitor as a biologist scans the insects’ bodies with a microscope-video camera. Later, the scientist, Andy Calderwood, inspects other insects, such as a six-inch-long giant centipede with 40 half-inch-long feet.

Calderwood displays his collection of three-inch hissing cockroaches and provokes a black widow spider to show how it can escape predators.

The museum only recently began allowing the public into the Insectary, the laboratory where insects are bred and reared for the museum’s new Cartwright Plant and Insect Hall. The Insectary is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 4 p.m. Call (805) 682-4711, extension 370.

SCIENCE FOR KIDS

* Children can celebrate the beginning of the new year by planting a seed and taking their project home in workshops offered by Kidspace Museum in Pasadena on Wednesday and Thursday at 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. Additional workshops will be offered on Wednesday during the Kidspace Free Family Night at 6 and 7 p.m. Call (818) 449-9144.

ENVIRONMENT

* Celebrate an early New Year’s Eve in a different way by joining in an outing to a waterfall in quiet Los Osos Canyon near Snow Creek Village. The moderate hike will be led by staffers from the Palm Springs Desert Museum on Friday at 9 a.m. Call (619) 325-7186.

* “Chronicles of the Canyon,” a docent-led exploration of Franklin Canyon, will visit Los Angeles’ highest waterfall and discuss the people who have used the canyon, from Native Americans to early Spanish settlers. The outing is sponsored by the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom on Sunday at 10 a.m. Call (310) 858-3090.