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There has been a few of these bugs found in my parents home. At the same time there has been mysterious bug bites on my niece who is 2.5 years old. It seems to be a small red mark that takes a long time to go away and it seems to be painful and itchy. Below is a description as best as I could observe of a captured specimen.

6 Legs
Cricket like rear legs
black and yellow mid section
brown and black legs
brown cylinder neck
head is half the size of neck
small black and possibly white eyes
antennas is about 1/4-1/2 inch long
antennas curve sharply at the end
four like teeth at the far end and bottom of face less than 1 mm long
may have had a stinger like back end, (damaged from capture)
tends to crawl, but has been seen to fly
wings tend to make the color of the mid section
bottom of the insect though has the same color as wings

please contact me if you really have a clue of what it could be, i have looked through all the pictures and cannot find a match.

email is

thank you if you could get some kind of answers ASAP.
Also we have already gone to the doctor about the wounds and he said that it looks similar to spider bites, but unsure. Cannot pursue very easily using doctors advice, due to lack of health insurance.


This by any chance? I know it says it's from New Zealand (where I live) but they are found in other places (Southern Hemisphere) and I found a video on YouTube of something found between France and Spain that looks like a weta to me... but I dunno...

The description of the bites -- "a small red mark that takes a long time to go away and it seems to be painful and itchy" --might indicate that these were flea bites.

bee like cricket
I just found this bug in my bathroom. Its has a honey bee like body,6 legs like a cricket,2 long antennas and 2 short antennas that curl down and back towards the body,then 2 very short antenna like things coming from its mouth,very small balck eyes,and on the back it looks like it has 2 more small antennas. Any ideas any one. I live in Missouri.


no the back legs were much lo
no the back legs were much longer and the whole body was honey bee color and size...I looked at several pictures of different kinds of crickets...and it looks like a Sand Treader...but I have no idea why they would be sand or basement here...its funny because when I found it, it was missing a long leg, about 20 min. after I caught it it lost its other leg and in the description it says they eat their extremities to keep from starving.
I would copy a picture here but I cant seem to figure it out...LOL

This bug? Even though it is blurry
A few days ago when I came home, I went to use the bathroom, course. But when I started to button my pants, there was this really weird bug there. I screamed and threw my pants off, I admit xD I am afraid of bugs so much. But today my cat was chasing what I thought was a cricket, and I got on the floor to see what it was, too. It freaked me out, but I don't know if it was the same bug. But I managed to get three pictures of it, but they are quite blurry, for my hands were really shaking. I will give them to you now, in case it is the same.

Hello Mejra,

Catch your breath, please! (Such phobias can really be dangerous -- good thing you were only peeing and not driving an automobile.)

I couldn't see anything in your image. How many legs?

Her picture's
a camel cricket. Totally harmless.

JJG4EVER indeed.

Firewood indoors?
Two types of possibilities here. I strongly suspect what you are describing is a harmless longhorned wood-boring beetle in the family Cerambycidae, especially something in the genus Neoclytus, Clytus, Xylotrechus, or Megacyllene. All are known to emerge indoors from firewood, even in the dead of winter, and all are, more-or-less, MIMICS of wasps in color and pattern. Neoclytus and Clytus have the elongated hind legs you mention.

Now, another possibility is the western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, which is known to come indoors during the colder months. It also fits the description you give, to a degree. It is likewise harmless.

My girlfriend and I just foun
My girlfriend and I just found this bug on top of one of our fish tank. Never seen this bug before but fits the description above perfectly. Only thing I can think of is it may have come in with some logs I bought at a 7-11 down the road. Seemed like a very calm bug, even when I picked it up in a napkin. Oh, we are in Northern DFW as well. Does anyone have any idea as to what this is?? Is there a new bug out there we don't know about and I just threw it out the damn door?!?

ID of the bite instead of the bug
Physicians often want to provide a definitive answer about the cause of skin lesions, but they are not generally qualified to tell you what kind of arthropod might have done the biting. Spiders rarely bite, and when they do, they rarely cause any noticeable damage. The presence of multiple lesions, appearing on different days mostly narrows it down to blood-feeding arthropods, assuming that an arthropod is to blame. Mosquitoes are the number one suspects. The bumps in kids tend to be larger and more inflamed than in adults. (The phenomenon is wonderfully named “Skeeter Syndrome”). There are other blood-feeding arthropods (fleas, bedbugs, no-see-ums, sandflies, etc.) but it is more likely that adults would also notice these bites on themselves due to a lack of immunologic tolerance from repeated exposure. While I’m very curious to know what the insects you’ve been seeing are, I suspect that they are not actually the cause of your niece’s lesions.

Good information!
John, I greatly enjoy reading your responses to such enquiries. I know from my own experience that as parents we immediately want to panic when something like this happens ("some fiend has invaded our child's bedroom"). Other than a thourough cleaning and laundering of the child's room (makes one feel like one is doing something), one has to accept that children are more susceptible to such things and usually exhibit a greater inflammatory response.

we are in north side of texas
might help identify

Kissing Bug?
Is this the insect?

It immediately came to mind because Texas had an outbreak of them a while back, as I recall. The article the image came from is at:

Google for 'Texas kissing bugs' for more.

Oregon seeing Kissing bugs now
The last five years we have seen kissing bugs like the one pictured in the Texas article. I thought they were a form of Alder Beetle till I kept finding them in and around the house.Last year I ID'd them as a kissing bug and saw several again this year.
Field Guides say nothting about them in NW Oregon area? I will ask an entomlg. at an extention service if I meet one.

expert verification necessary
to an untrained eye, great many members of the reduviid family may look like kissing bugs

the bug had a slender body like a bees body, thinner legs, much darker body with black and white stipes throughout the body and a round small head,ALSO WE ARE IN THE NORTHERN PART OF THE DFW

The description sounds kind of like a hymenopteran
There are some ichneumonids with striping patterns of yellow/white and black, their back legs are large and might be "cricket-like", and they do tend to walk more than they fly, while looking for prey. Just shooting in the dark, but does it look anything like one of these:

If so, it is certainly not responsible for the lesions. These wasps don't really sting people. I'd tend to agree with Dr. Carlson that there may be hidden pests in the child's bed (fleas, bedbugs) or that the lesions are from something else entirely.

Please, a photo
Even a blurry photo would help us out a lot. If you don't have a digital camera, do you know someone who does?

How about a scanner?
Scanners are great for taking images of dead or chilled specimens. As long as none of the specimen is too far away from the glass, it comes out pretty much all in focus and well-lit

How about this? Is this the critter you've been seeing?

This is one of the species Eric pointed out above.

My classroom has this weird t
My classroom has this weird type of bug also but it doesn't sting. It looks sort of like the picture above, any hints?

I feed them to my frogs.

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