Rita Fernow, age 11, of St. Paul, Minnesota, for her question:

What exactly is a scarab?

The scarab is a beetle with hard, shiny front wings, usually folded neatly over his back. He belongs to a fascinating family of over 30,000 different species. More than 900 species live in North America. Some are pests, but all have interesting life stories. For example, most of the parent scarabs roll up their eggs in a ball of dirt and bury the ball in the ground. There the young grubs hatch and later hide during their pupa stage. The white grubs of our May beetle scarab stay below ground two or three years, feeding on the roots of plants.

Our ox beetle and unicorn beetle are large and handsome scarabs. Our biggest one is the rhinoceros beetle, often more than two inches long. Much larger scarabs live in the tropics. Our tumblebug beetle is a blue black scarab who rolls her eggs in a ball of dung. This dung is a source of nourishment to the scarab larvae. Her relatives lived in ancient Egypt and the people respected her because she seemed to be such a hard worker. She was the so called sacred scarab of Egypt.