For the fourth year in a row, Franklin Pest Solutions sponsored interns at the 2025 Purdue University Bug Bowl.
Twenty-year-old Aiden Bemis is a native of Middlebury, Ind., and is an accounting major at the Mitch Daniels School of Business. He credits the internship with re-sparking a fascination with what so many kids love about bugs while growing up in the Midwest.
“I grew up in a rural area, so I’ve grown up around farms and always played in the dirt,” Bemis said. “Some of my earliest memories are looking for pillbugs – we called them roly polies — in the woods under rocks and catching fireflies. As a child, I also loved looking for milkweed on the side of the road for monarch caterpillars as well as going to local honey farms and catching fireflies.”
Bugs and accounting might seem to be mutually exclusive, but Bemis is going to continue to work in the entomology department next semester.
Colleen Murphy, 22, returned for a second year as a Bug Bowl intern. She is also an Indiana native, having grown up in Salem, and will graduate this spring with a major in insect biology and a minor in wildlife science.
“I love insects because they are everywhere in the world around us. My favorite insects are fungus weevils because they have an interesting, mottled pattern and are very cute,” Murphy said.
Janelle “The Bug Girl” Iaccino, marketing director of Franklin and its parent company, Rose Pest Solutions, spoke on Franklin’s recurring commitment to sponsor students in the Bug bowl.
“We love encouraging and introducing an awareness and love of the insect world,” Iaccino said. “We coexist in an exquisite way and bugs are so important to the world we live in. What many might not know is that pollinators like bees, butterflies, birds and beetles are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat. It’s pretty sobering and why learning, appreciating and protecting the insect world is so important.”
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