Animal Insting

We have lots of dust bunnies at our house, but sadly, they cannot be eaten, like real bunnies can.  Well, I guess you could eat them, but they're not very tasty.  Mostly, dust bunnies hide out in corners and under furniture and places like that.  Then sometimes if there's a little breeze or something, they will come out and hop around a few times before they hide under the furniture again.

Dust bunnies are made of stuff that's all clumped together, like hair, lint, fibers, cobwebs, and dead skin.  And sometimes there are some trashy little things like paper and feathers in them, too.  The reason all this stuff sticks together is because of static electricity and also because of something called felting, which mashes a bunch of fibers together and makes a kind of fabric.

The bad thing about dust bunnies -- besides the fact that you can't eat them -- is that these teeny little spider cousins called "dust mites" like to live inside the bunnies.  They are so very teeny that you can't even see them without a microscope.  And what they do is they hatch out and then they eat little bits of dead skin, and they poop and they mate and they lay eggs.  And that's how they spend their whole lives.  They never go out for walks or to the movies or anything like that.  Which might be okay unless you are allergic to dust mite poop, because if you are, you can have all kinds of trouble breathing and you might get itchy skin.  This can happen to dogs and cats, too, and not just to humans.

And the other bad thing that dust bunnies do is they can clog up the vents of your electronic equipment and make it get too hot because it can't breathe.

When Mom was growing up, she never heard of a "dust bunny."  At her house, they were just called "dust balls."  But when she got to college, then she heard about "dust bunnies," and she thought maybe it was just people in certain parts of the country who called them that.  So I did some in-depth research on where the term "dust bunny" came from, but I could not find out who used it first or where they used it.

What I did find out was that it started about 1966, and that was only a few years before Mom went to college and learned that there were dust bunnies under her bed.  I also found out that the British do not call a clump of dust a "bunny," and neither do the people who speak Polish, German, Spanish, or Danish.  African-Americans call them "dust balls," just like Mom used to do.  But the French people call them sheep!

Here are some other things you can call a dust bunny:  dust kitty, dust kitten, turkey's nest, beggar's velvet, or slut's wool.

Okay, now I'm going to tell you another interesting thing that I found out.  There's this artist, and her name is Suzanne Proulx, and she makes Art out of dust and lint.  And the Art that she makes is shaped like bunnies!  In fact, the name of it is Dust Bunnies.  And this just goes to show that you can make Art out of almost anything!