By Kalena Reynolds | Staff Writer
“The Bug Lady” business owner Alaina Michaels grew up watching her peers experiment with questions surrounding their identity and passions. She said her experience was different.
For Michaels, bugs — and more specifically, bees — had always been a significant part of her life. However, Michaels eventually had to shift her emphasis in research due to her extreme allergy to bees.
Michaels graduated with a degree in organismal biology from the University of Arizona, which allowed her to complete research and work in various fields to gain knowledge on different types of species, she said.
“The University of Arizona is a huge research college, obviously, but we have a really great ecology, and it’s just a really cool place to study that [has] lots of weird plants and bugs and stuff,” Michaels said.
From catching minnows in a creek behind her house with her brother to teaching a class at Trident Technical College, Michaels’ entire life has been surrounded by her passion for nature.
“I teach college biology now for my school in South Carolina — still online — so I have a lot of students that come to me and are like, ‘How did you know what you wanted to do?’ And I’m like, ‘I really can’t empathize with you at all because I always knew it was something in biology.’”
After graduating, Michaels moved to Charleston, S.C., with her husband and launched her business, The Bug Lady, in 2022. This business involves creating “pinning workshops,” in which she takes a group of people through a variety of steps so that each person can create their own personal pinned bug.
When first starting The Bug Lady, Michaels messaged local businesses and breweries, hoping to find new venues to host workshops.
After multiple workshops, Michaels was met with a growing customer base and new enthusiastic business, ultimately picking up a growing clientele.
“So basically, I bring some cool, weird insects… and I like to yell at you about bugs and bring my education collection, and people were paying me to do that,” Michaels said.
Once word spread about her unique business venture, she began conducting workshops in Montessori schools and curated events.
“People paid me to do after-school programming for their kids and just go out with nets and pretty much hang out,” Michaels said. “We had the little workbooks. It was doing really well. It was kind of however much work I put into it, which is nice when you work for yourself.”
After moving to Waco in May 2024 because of a job opportunity for her husband, Sean McBride, Michaels has since been able to transition her business to find new places to host workshops.
McBride said finding new customers in Waco has been easy for Michaels because, like Charleston, word spreads fast and the community prioritizes unique events.
“All of these people talk to each other because both of these towns are so small that everybody just kind of knows everybody,” McBride said. “So as soon as you start working with somebody, everyone else basically just starts jumping on it.”
While Micheals prioritizes fun and entertainment during her workshops, she also incorporates educational elements that emphasize the importance of protecting the species people work with. Michaels said she ensures that she sources her bugs from ethical collectors or people that raise them for educational purposes so they only work with specimens that have had the best quality of life possible.
“It’s somewhere between art and science, and this thing died because we’re doing this, and that’s okay, but I don’t really do a ton of collecting unless it’s for research quality stuff or education stuff anymore,” Michaels said.
