This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Orkin Ecologist. All opinions are 100% mine.

A few years ago, my now-fiance and I moved from a city I had lived in my entire life to a rural area surrounded by farms and forests. At first, we lived in an apartment that was severely lacking in outside space, but we did get to enjoy the little things about being far enough out of the city — the air is cleaner and it’s easier to breathe, the population of rabbits is huge, and the amount of parks we had in such a small residential area were a real treat to live near.

Almost two years ago, we moved into our own home, complete with a nice plot of green space all our own. Almost immediately we began to fill in the gaps of what we had missed out on during our stint in apartment living in this area, mostly the new, interesting, and sometimes terrifying bugs that were lurking, well, everywhere.

There is a huge difference between city bugs and country bugs.

I have never been particularly afraid of bugs. Rodents? Yes. But bugs just never seemed like a huge threat to me. However, some of the bugs I have come into contact with in just the last two summers just haven’t looked natural. You see them and almost do a double-take, your mind certain that something like that just can’t really exist.

Just a few months ago I had my worst #BugOut moment to-date. I was out on my back porch, talking to a friend of mine on the phone while enjoying the warm, mildly humid late-night summer weather, when the biggest spider I have ever seen in my life appeared out of seemingly nowhere, and proceeded to quickly — too quickly — travel directly towards me. I jumped, I flailed, I shouted a string of expletives, the only words that my brain could function enough to put together in my time of terror. I ran into the house and refused to go back outside until my fiance had checked it out and promised that the spider was gone.

After a quick search for common spiders in my area, and looking at pictures of the many types of spiders I have a good chance of coming across at some point, I found my back porch trespasser: a wolf spider.

Even just looking at pictures of them now sends chills up my spine.

It’s really no wonder why out of all of the many varieties of bugs I have seen, that my biggest problem would be with spiders. Spiders do, after all, top the general lists of common phobias, including the Orkin Ecologist’s top 10 bug phobias. Also making their list are cockroaches, ants, worms, and termites.

I think one of the main reasons why most bugs don’t terrify me to the point that the wolf spider did is because I have always had a very deep appreciation for nature. I belong near the country, rather than in a city, because I am always marveling at how the environment works and the lengths Mother Nature goes in order to survive. It’s fascinating, really.

It is for that reason why I really love the Orkin Ecologist website. It is a fantastic educational resource that explores and explains the science of bugs, their role and importance in the eco-system (like the honey bee and how without them over $15 billion would be lost in the US farms and food industry), the social lives of insects, and the history of how we have been able to use bugs in medicine. The website also has a lot of fun information and things to do, like craft tutorials, science fair ideas, and apps that make learning about the science of bugs fun for kids.

Do you have a particularly scary #BugOut experience of your own? Share it in the comments!