BROOKINGS —  Saturday afternoon brought near-perfect, late-summer weather to McCrory Gardens and a total of about 250 parents accompanied by their children  turned out for the seventh annual Insect Festival.

Hosted by South Dakota State  University Extension and McCrory Gardens, the free event featured: garden tours; interactive education (including hands-on activities and a snack on edible-insects for those with adventurous taste buds); educational displays; local vendors; crafts; and an insect-costume parade.

Blue Dasher Farm, in rural Estelline, offered several displays and hands-on activities that were both educational and entertaining.

Bobbie Wilson, an agroecologist and apiarist, had a hive on hand and shared her knowledge of honeybee activities and offered a taste of honey to kids and their parents.

Other Dasher Farm staffers offered — and plenty of kids accepted — the opportunity to pet some gargantuan-sized Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Meanwhile Dr. Kelton Welch, a Dasher research entomologist had a stable of Dubia roaches at a racetrack. Kids made their picks and each youngster seemed to have picked their roach as the winner. No place and show roaches in any of the races. Welch explained that at one festival there had been an attempt to put an identifying tag on each roach; it didn’t work, because the IDs didn’t stay attached.

Come 2:30 p.m. it was time for a key event: the “Pollinator Parade.” Leading the march of kids costumed as insects was Diane Kinney, local puppeteer on hand with “Fred” and another puppet or two. The piped-in parade music was an interesting choice: “Semper Fidelis,” composed many decades by John Philip Sousa; it remains the official march of the United States Marine Corps.

For Sidonia “Sydney” Trio, McCrory Gardens education coordinator/SDSU Extension horticulture assistant, this was her third year planning the annual gala that is always one of McCrory’s most appreciated events. She began her relationship with McCrory Gardens as a sophomore staffer in 2019. She graduated from SDSU in May 2022 with a degree in horticulture. She called the Gardens her “perfect place.”

Trio sees the event as “helping spread the understanding and importance of insects in our environment, from pollination to providing a food source for other animals.”

Co-hosting the event was Amanda Bachman, SDSU Extension Urban Entomology field specialist.

Contact: jkubal@brookingsregister.com.

SDSU Marketing and Communications contributed to this report.