Wasp

The wasp is the name of certain stinging insects of the order Hymenoptera, which also includes ants, bees and sawflies.

Pixiebay

The wasps are a cosmopolitan paraphyletic grouping of hundreds of thousands of species. The term wasp is sometimes used more narrowly for the common or garden wasps, Vespula vulgaris, and hornets (Vespa), which has are members of the eusocial family Vespidae. This has about 5000 species.

By far the greater number of wasp species (over 100,000) are the parasitic wasps.

ANATOMY 

The Asian Giant Hornet is the largest wasp in the world, with a body length of 50 mm (2 inches) and wingspan of 76 mm (3 inches).

The Asian giant hornet By NUMBER7isBEST

The smallest wasps are solitary chalcid wasps in the family Mymaridae, including the world's smallest known insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, which is smaller than a housefly's eye.

Wasps have biting mouthparts and antennae with 12 or 13 segments. They usually have wings and their abdomens are attached to their thorax by a narrow waist, the petiole.

In addition to their large compound eyes, wasps have several simple eyes known as ocelli, which are typically arranged in a triangle just forward of the vertex of the head.

BEHAVIOR 

While some species of wasp are social, the vast majority are solitary insects, many of them parasitoids.

Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs in the caterpillars of other insect species. Almost every pest insect species has at least one wasp species that preys upon it or parasitizes it.

Among social wasps, the queens devote themselves to egg-laying, the fertilised eggs producing female workers. The males arise from unfertilized eggs and have no sting.

The larvae are fed on insects, but the mature wasps feed mainly on fruit and sugar.

Pixiebay

In winter the fecundated queens hibernate but the other wasps die.

Some wasps nest below ground others in trees or bushes.

All species of social wasps construct their nests using some form of plant fiber (mostly wood pulp) as the primary material

There is a species of solitary wasp called the mud dauber which builds its nests out of mud.

The pulp papermaking process is traditionally ascribed to Chinese Han Dynasty court official and eunuch Cai Lun (50-121 AD). The story goes that Cai Lun made the breakthrough, inspired by watching wasps gathering fibres from dead wood and plant stems and mixing them with saliva, to construct nests made of gray or brown papery material.

Social wasps constructing a paper nest. By Kathy Jones 

Sand wasps fly backwards out of the nest to make sure they'll remember what the way home looks like.

RELATIONSHIP WITH HUMANS 

More people are stung by yellow jackets, a type of wasp, than any other wasp or bee.

The tarantula hawk wasp has a non-deadly sting so painful, experienced professionals will just suggest you to lie down and scream if stung, because most people lose verbal and physical coordination afterwards.

Male tarantula hawk at Grant Ranch County Park, near San Jose, California

The venom of a wasp contains chemicals that attracts other wasps to also attack the victim.

Wasps taste like pine nuts.

FUN WASP FACTS 

Wasps are an important part of the food chain. They catch insects — including flies and caterpillars, and act as food for small mammals, birds, and spiders.

In 2001 Dutch scientists announced that they had found a way of using wasps to detect drugs or explosives in just one hour. The antennae of wasps are more sensitive than sniffer dogs' noses, which take six months to be trained.

Sources 1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted (Quite Interesting), The Encyclopedia of Useless Information By William Hartston

Termite

A termite is a soft bodied social insect, of the tropical order the Isoptera.

Termites live in colonies that, at maturity, hold from several hundred to several million individuals. The colonies comprise one or more queens, who are of relatively enormous size. Also living there are much smaller kings, and still smaller soldiers, workers and nymphs (semi-mature young).

Macro image of a termite worker. By Sanjay Acharya

The termite can live 30 years while the queen termite has the longest life span of any insect in the world, living up to 50 years old, producing at times an egg every two seconds.

Queen termites can 'permit' secondary reproductives (females) to create satellite nests for the colony, but can also chemically block reproduction for the entire colony at any time if she chooses.

Mature queen termite surrounded by both workers and soldiers. http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/image/2289

Termites spend a great deal of time grooming each other. Their good hygiene is important to their survival, as it keeps parasites and harmful bacteria under control within the colony.

The total mass of all the world's termites exceeds the mass of all the human beings.

Termites can produce up to two liters of hydrogen from ingesting a single sheet of paper, making them one of the Earth's most efficient bioreactors.

Termites have been known to eat food twice as fast when heavy metal music is playing.

Termites may dispose of a quarter of the vegetation litter of an area.

Their wood-eating habits (as in houses and other buildings) brings termites in conflicts with human beings. The wood is broken down in their stomachs by numerous pieces of microorganism, living in symbiosis with their hosts.

In 1713, a pair of Brazilian monks took a swarm of termites to court for eating their monastery. The termites were acquitted when the defense successfully argued that the monks were trespassing on the insects' land, and they were ordered to compensate them by providing a replacement habitat. 

Most termites nest underground their entire lives, but termites in Africa and Australia are the greatest builders in the insect kingdom. In Australia they create complex mounds up to 30.5m (100ft) in circumference and 6m (20ft), with chimneys, ridges and pinnacles.

Termite hill (Pixabay)

A pound of termites has more nutrients than a pound of beef or pork.

Praying mantis

The Mantis is a type of insect. They are usually known as praying mantids because of their prayer-like stance.

Over 2,400 species of mantis in about 430 genera are recognized. They are predominantly found in tropical regions, but some live in temperate areas.

In Europe, the name "praying mantis" refers to only a single species, Mantis religiosa.

Praying mantis by Shiva shankar - Taken at karkala, Karnataka, India. Wikipedia

The movement of the Mantis' head is remarkably flexible. It gives nearly 300 degrees of movement in some species. The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.

The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates mating by ripping the male's head off.

The male praying mantis has an extra "brain" in its rear, which controls the necessary motions for copulation. This means the mantis can continue mating after the female has eaten his head.

Being devoured by his mate improves a male praying mantis' genetic success by increasing the number of eggs laid by his partner.

The Praying Mantis is the only insect known to have 3D vision, although they only see in black and white.

Head of Archimantis latistyla, showing the compound eyes and labrum. By Fir0002 

The praying mantis has only one ear, which is located on the underside of its belly, just forward of its hind legs.

They are the only creature on Earth with a single ear.

The mantis cannot discriminate the direction of sound, nor its frequency.

Their diet usually consists of living insects, including flies and aphids. Larger species have been known to prey on small lizards, birds, frogs, snakes, and even rodents.

They either camouflage themselves and remain stationary, waiting for prey to approach, or stalk their prey with slow, stealthy movements.

Malaysian orchid mantises are camouflaged, matching the coloration of local orchids. I, Luc Viatour,

The Praying Mantis can detect movement up to 60 feet away.

The Swagap tribe, who belong to the indigenous tribes of Papua New Guinea, worship the praying mantis.

Moth

SPECIES 

There are thought to be approximately 160,000 species of moth, which is nine times as many as species of butterfly.

The ancient Chinese co-opted an indigenous silk moth for their purposes. The Bombyx mori is still the only insect to have been fully domesticated (in the sense that, unlike the bee, it cannot live in the wild and is not known in a wild form). The silk moth has lost the power to fly; its caterpillar can find no mulberry leaves for itself. The species exists, and survives, only because humans like silk.

Adult silkworm moth. By CSIRO, Wikipedia Commons

A male silkworm moth can smell a female more than seven miles away.

Paired male (above), female (below) silk moths. By Oakenking at en.wikipedia, 

Bats like to eat moths, so there is a species of tiger moth that has developed ultrasonic clicking sounds that jam a bat's echo-location.

Eubetia bigaulae is a Venezuelan moth named by Smithsonian entomologist John Brown. Its species is pronounced "you betcha by golly."

The world's largest moth, the Atlas moth of Southeast Asia, can reach up to 12 inches with a surface area of 62 square inches.

ANATOMY 

Moths can be told apart from butterflies in several ways. Moth antenna look like little feathers, and their wings are held flat on their backs when they are not flying.

Many moths have no mouths and do not eat. They live for a week, during which they mate and lay eggs.

Moths have the best hearing in the animal kingdom. They are are able to hear frequencies a hundred times higher than what humans can voice.

The moth has the ability to hear a higher frequency than their main predator, the bat, allowing them to escape before they can be attacked.

The largest moth in the world, the Hercules Moth, has a wingspan up to 36cm (14in) and spends up to two years in its cocoon. It only lives two to eight days as it has no mouth and ultimately dies of starvation.

The Lygodium Spider Moth has markings to make it look like a spider to scare predators.

The thorax fur of moths acts as a lightweight porous sound absorber, facilitating acoustic camouflage and offering a significant survival advantage against bats.

Some moths can fly 25 miles per hour.

BEHAVIOR 

Moths are highly attracted by beer, ale and lager.

Moths are more likely to lay their eggs on, feed on, and rest on the plant species where they lost their virginity.

According to research published in 2002, female moths prefer to mate with larger males, especially if the female had a large father.

In 2008, research showed that some moths can remember things they learnt as caterpillars.

A caterpillar of death's-head hawkmoth. By Irshadpp - Wikipedia Commons

Moths vibrate their genitals to avoid bats. This action produces ultrasound that jams bats’ built-in sonar, rendering the moths temporarily "invisible."

It is not the adult moth that eats clothing but the larvae: tiny caterpillars that feast on any keratin-based fibers but are particularly partial to wool and cashmere.

FUN FACTS 

As a pastime, watching moths is known as mothing, which has given rise to the term "mother" for someone who engages in this activity. It is sometimes written with a hyphen (moth-er) to distinguish it from the more common word of the same spelling.

On September 9, 1947, a failure in an early computer at Harvard University was traced to a moth trapped in a relay. This is said to be the origin of programming errors being called "bugs". Actually the term "bug" had long been used for inexplicable engineering defects but the Harvard moth was the first bug caused by a real bug.

A page from the Harvard computer's log, featuring a dead moth that was removed from the device

Sources Historyworld.net, Daily Express

Mosquito

HISTORY

The word ‘mosquito’ comes from the Spanish for ‘little fly’.

The Greek name for the Mosquito is Anopheles, translating to "good-for-nothing".

A female mosquito of the Culicidae family (Culiseta longiareolata). 

The first reference to a mosquito in English came in 1572 when it was described as “A certeine gnat or flie … which biteth both men and women in their sleepe.”

The earliest known use of the word 'zip' was in 1875 when it was used for the noise of mosquitoes.

Nazis introduced malaria-carrying mosquitoes to Italy in World War II as revenge after the country changed sides, causing a seven year long outbreak in the region.

In 2008, Finnish police found a dead mosquito while searching the inside of a stolen car. They tested the blood from the mosquito's last meal and successfully used it to identify the thief.

SPECIES 

Mosquitoes are members of a family of nematocerid flies: the Culicidae

There are about 3500 known species of mosquitoes. They are found from pole to pole and are most prevalent in warmer climates.

There are no mosquitos in Iceland.

FEEDING ON HUMANS 

While male mosquitoes typically feed on nectar and plant juices, the female needs to obtain nutrients from a "blood meal" before she can produce eggs. In some of the species of mosquito, the females feed on humans, and are therefore vectors for a number of infectious diseases.

A female mosquito will usually rest on all six legs for at least a minute or so before starting to bite. The insertion of her lancets into a juicy capillary usually takes about another minute.

Female Ochlerotatus notoscriptus feeding on a human arm, Tasmania, Australia

Most people never feel the bite nor the presence of the insect but rather what is left behind. The mosquito injects its saliva (the source of many transmitted diseases), which acts as an anticoagulant as well as an anesthetic.

Shortly after the bite the anesthetic effect wears off and in most people an itchy, allergic reaction follows.

A mosquito can drink up to three times its weight in blood.

It would take 1,200,000 mosquitoes, each sucking once, to completely drain all the blood from a human body.

Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide us from them The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.

Mosquitoes are particularly attracted to people that have recently eaten bananas.

ANATOMY 

Mosquitoes have mouthparts that are adapted for piercing the skin of plants and animals.

Only female mosquitoes have the mouth parts needed to suck blood from other animals.

Mosquito wings beat about 300-600 times a second, which is what makes their buzzing sound.

Mosquitoes fly at speeds between 1 and 1.5 miles per hour, making them one of the slowest flying insects of all.

Because mosquitos are such slow fliers, the breeze from a small electric fan is enough to keep them away.

Mosquitoes can fly through rain drops without getting hit.

Unlike the wings of flies, mosquito wings are covered by fine scales.

BEHAVIOR 

Mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue twice as much as to any other color.

Some species of mosquito have been found to change the speed of their wing flaps in order to harmonize with potential mates.

Mosquitos can mate in about 15 seconds.

They use the blood not for their own food but as a source of protein for their eggs.

After gorging on a feast of blood the mosquito flies off and lays her eggs in water.

Most mosquitoes rest or sleep in a dark, sheltered place during the daylight hours, preferably an area that is relatively humid, such as tucked inside vegetation like plants and grass.

Male mosquitoes live for only about ten days; most females live six to eight weeks.

Some females hibernate and can live up to six months.

DISEASE 

Sir Ronald Ross was dissecting the stomach tissue of a mosquito that had been fed four days previously on a malarious patient. On August 20, 1897, he found the malaria parasite and went on to prove the role of female mosquitoes transmit malaria between humans.

Being a doctor rather than a zoologist, Ross did not name the species that carried malaria but said it was “grey moquito with dappled wings”.

Ronald Ross By Unknown - Wikipedia Commons

Ross' discovery earned him the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902, the first Briton to win a Nobel.

August 20th is World Mosquito Day, commemorating the day in 1897 when Sir Ronald Ross confirmed the Anopheles mosquito as the vector that carries malaria.

According to the World Health Organisation, mosquito bites kill over a million people every year.

The World Mosquito Project scientists cultivate and release mosquitoes infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia. The bacterium is passed down to future generations. The bacterium appears to block mosquitos from transmitting arboviruses (dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever) and Zika.

Having an O blood type makes you twice as likely to attract mosquitoes than people with A blood type. B blood types fall in the middle of the spectrum.

Sources Daily Express, Encarta Encyclopedia

Maggot

A maggot is the common name of the footless larvae of some types of flies.The name is generally applied to the larvae of Brachyceran flies, such as houseflies, cheese flies, and blowflies, rather than larvae of the Nematocera, such as mosquitoes and Crane flies.

Saint Simeon Stylites (c. 388 –September 2, 459) was a Syriac ascetic saint who achieved fame for living 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar near Aleppo in Syria. For a period of a year he stood on one leg and tied a rope around his waist so tightly that his lower body became putrefied and infested with ulcers and maggots. He proceeded to eat the maggots saying, "Eat what God has given to you."

16th-century icon of Simeon Stylites. 

Italian scientist Francesco Redi proved in 1668 that maggots come from the eggs of flies. At the time, prevailing wisdom was that maggots arose spontaneously from rotting meat.

In 2004, the FDA approved the use of medical maggots to clean away the dead flesh around non-healing wounds.

Certain types of maggots are parasitic, like the Botfly larvae. These larvae spend part of their life cycle as parasites under the skin of living animals. As a result myiasis will take place in the host causing symptoms like sores and irritating lesions and even death.

Maggots generate so much heat when they feed on a corpse that, in a confined space, they can raise temperatures up to 122°F (50°C).

The presence of maggots on a corpse is useful in the estimation of time elapsed since death. The eggs are laid directly on the food source and when the eggs hatch, the maggots move towards their preferred conditions and begin to feed. By studying the type of and development of the insects present at a crime scene, forensic entomologists can determine the approximate time of death.

Maggots on a porcupine carcass. By Paul venter -Wikipedia Commons

Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese that contains live maggots.

The rat-tailed maggot is cultured and sold as fish bait. They are especially popular in ice and trout fishing.

In Germany, "Leben wie die maden im speck"—"to live like a maggot in bacon"—is an idiom for having a luxurious lifestyle.

Locust

Locusts are the swarming phase of certain species of short-horned grasshoppers. Such swarms are usually made of a huge number of locusts. They do a lot of damage to the places where they pass, by eating the crops.

It is estimated that the largest swarms have covered hundreds of miles and consisted of many billions of locusts. In ancient times the trail of destruction led by clouds of locusts resulted in armies being set against them and priests putting them on trial.

When still a monk, Pope Gregory the Great received permission to lead a mission to England. The party had not gone far when Gregory was halted by a sign. A locust dropped onto the Bible he was reading. "Locusta", he exclaimed. ("Locastat" means remain in your place.) He returned to Rome and soon after being elected Pope he was able to send Augustine of Canterbury instead.

Already struggling after two years of drought, settlers in the west of America during the 1870s were hit by a huge locust swarm, 1,800 miles long and over 110 miles wide that reaped massive destruction. The insect horde burnt tons of vegetation to fuel its migration causing $200 million in crop damage in Colorado, Nebraska, and several other states. Farmers that tied to shoo them away had the clothes eaten right off their bodies. And when the locusts landed on lakes and died in their millions, they left stinking ramparts, six feet high and two miles long across the shores, turning the water putrid and undrinkable.

Prayers were said for deliverance and without warning the locusts disappeared never to return. The insects' extinction has been a source of puzzlement. Recent research suggests that during the large influx of settlers their breeding grounds in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains came to be disturbed. The plowing and irrigation by the settlers of the sandy river beds accidentally destroyed the underground eggs and today North America is the only populated continent without a major locust.

A desert locust swarm can be 460 square miles in size and can consume 423 million pounds of plants in a single day.

Millions of swarming Australian plague locusts on the move. By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35486123

Locust swarms move so fast because each locust is trying to eat the one in front and avoid being eaten by the one behind.

The cicada, whose Latin name is Cicada Septemdecim (17 letters), is a locust that takes 17 years to mature. After the cicada eggs hatch, the resulting nymph burrows in the ground for 17 years.

Cicada's wings have an anti-bacterial surface that kills bacteria not by chemicals, but by using a nanopattern made of nano pillars that shreds the bacterial membrane.

Cicadas can get as loud as a rock concert and can even damage human hearing.

The locust is the only insect considered kosher in Judaism.

Sources Faber Book of Anecdotes, Daily Mail

Ladybird

Ladybirds, sometimes known as Ladybugs and less commonly Lady Beetles are named for a specific lady- the Virgin Mary. The reason why isn't precisely known.

Ladybirds are actually beetles and their correct name is The Ladybird Beetle.

The earliest mention of the word "ladybird", referring to the beetle, is noted by the Oxford English Dictionary to have occurred in 1674 in a dictionary of sorts covering southern English words.

There are 4,300 known species of ladybugs in the world.

There are 46 types of ladybird in Britain, but only 26 have bright colors and patterns that make them recognizable as ladybirds.

An estimated 23 billion seven-spot ladybirds swarmed England's eastern and southern coasts during a heatwave in 1976.

A group of ladybugs is called a "loveliness of ladybugs."

Ladybirds often hibernate in clumps made up of millions of individuals.

The 10-spot ladybird has between 0 and 15 spots.

Happy Female ladybirds, which are larger than males, eat as many as 75 aphids a day.

A Ladybird's wings are four times the size of its body.

Ladybirds can fly 74 miles non-stop. They can reach speeds of 37 mph 959.5 kmh)— the same as a racehorse — and heights of 3,600ft. (1.1 km).

The brighter the color of a ladybug, the more toxic it is.

Ladybugs bleed from their knees when threatened.

Insect

Insects have six legs and bodies in three sections: abdomen, head and thorax.

In ancient Egypt, servants were covered in honey so as to attract flies away from the Pharaoh.

During the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition the naturalist Trevor Kincaid collected about 8,000 specimens of insect, resulting in the discovery and naming of more than 240 new species. They included Mesenchytraeus harrimani which he named after the expedition's patron, E. H. Harriman.

Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokémon, loved insect collecting as a child. As more and more land was paved over to make room for Japan's cities, Tajiri became inspired to create the Pokémon video games so that other children could experience the joy of catching bugs just as he had.

The mystery of how insects fly was solved following some brilliant work by Danish scientist Torkel Weis-fogh (1922-1975), a professor of zoology at Cambridge University in the 1970s. He explained that an insect’s wing works by encouraging air to flow over it in such a way that when the air leaves the rear edge of the wing, it moves downwards. The resultant eddy produces an upwards thrust on the wing.

In 2004, to study the declining insect population, almost 40,000 UK drivers affixed a "splatometer" to the front of their cars. The results found one squashed insect per 5 miles driven, contrasting with summers of 30 years ago when windshields would quickly become encrusted with tiny bodies.

At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive.

There are more than 26 billion insects living in each square mile of habitable land on Earth.

There are 1.4 billion insects for every human on Earth.

Every acre of crop harvested contains 100 lbs. of insects.

80% of the animals on Earth are insects.

The combined weight of all insects on earth is 70 times greater than the combined weight of all humans.

More than a million species of insects have been discovered and named. Some 24,000 can be found in the UK.

The rarest insect in the world is the Lord Howe Island stick insect. It was believed to be extinct since 1920 until some were found again in 2001. In 2006 there were only about 50 of them, but only two years later their population increased to 700.

The only insect indigenous to Antarctica is the wingless midge Belgica antarctica. It has the smallest known insect genome, with only 99 million base pairs of nucleotides (and about 13,500 genes).

Insects don't have lungs. They just kinda absorb oxygen and it is related to their size, which is why bugs got so big when the Earth had more oxygen.

The sound produced by insects rubbing their legs together is called 'stridulation'.

Insects do sort of sleep at times, their state of rest is called torpor. They are only aroused by strong stimuli – the heat of day, the darkness of night, or at times a sudden attack by a predator.

Thopha saccata, commonly known as the double drummer, is the largest Australian species of cicada and reputedly the loudest insect in the world. Its common name comes from the large dark red-brown sac-like pockets that the adult male has on each side of its abdomen—the "double drums"—that are used to amplify the sound it produces.

The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head through 180 degrees.

The small hopping insect Issus Coleoptratus uses toothed gears on its joints to precisely synchronize the kicks of its hind legs as it jumps forward. This insect has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature.

The smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than a housefly's eye.

2.5 billion people are estimated to regularly eat insects every day. Insects contain high amounts of fiber, protein, vitamins and minerals.

In the course of an average lifetime you'll, while sleeping, eat 70 insects and 10 spiders.

Many female insects mate only once in their lives.  To control insect populations, a clever strategy has been developed: introducing swarms of sterile males into the wild. These males are unable to father offspring, and when they encounter the females, they engage in a mating ritual. The females, having mated with these sterile males, never give birth and simply die.

The most painful insect sting is from a bullet ant that can be found in Central and South America. The pain caused by this insect's sting is, according to some victims, equal to being shot, hence the name of the ant.

Bullet ant near La Selva Biological Station (OTS), Costa Rica. By © Hans Hillewaert. Wikipedia

The blast of air you feel when walking into a store is to prevent insects from flying in.

The most insects used in a movie is the 22 million bees used in The Swarm.

African driver ant queens lay the most eggs of any insect species: 3 to 4 million eggs every 25 days.

The actor Chris Pratt and his then-wife Anna Faris clicked over their shared hobby — collecting insects.

Here is a list of song titles with insects in them.

Source Daily Express

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Horse-fly

Female horseflies need to drink blood before they can reproduce.

The males are vegetarian, but females regularly attack humans, horses and other mammals to feast on blood, often transmitting diseases.

Female horseflies are equipped with powerful jaws that tear and cut. Viewed under a microscope, the mouthparts look like jagged saw blades.

Female horseflies have one of the most painful bites of any insect because they actually rip a hole in the skin to soak up the blood that comes out.

Left uncontrolled, 20-30 horseflies can drain almost a third of a pint of blood from their victims in as little as six hours.

They can grow to 1.25in long (3.2cm) and are among the world's largest flies.

Horseflies prefer to fly in sunlight, avoiding dark and shady areas, and are inactive at night.

Source Daily Mail

Grasshopper

Sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit is the minimum temperature required for a grasshopper to be able to hop.

Grasshoppers have ears on their stomach. They have membranes that vibrate in response to sound waves on each side of the first abdominal segment, tucked under the wings. This simple eardrum, called a tympana, allows the grasshopper to hear the songs.

Grasshoppers have white blood.

Grasshoppers throw up when they're in danger.

Grasshoppers that live near a road have learned to call at a higher pitch than more rural grasshoppers so as to be heard over the traffic. This increases their chances of mating. 

There is a parasitic worm in grasshoppers that after growing to maturity, makes the grasshoppers seek water and drown themselves to return the parasite to water.

A pound of grasshoppers is almost as nutritious as a pound of beef.

Candied grasshoppers, known as inago, are a popular cocktail snack in Japan.

The long-horned Grasshopper is a delicacy in Uganda, where it was traditionally harvested by women in exchange for a new dress from their husbands.

Locusts are the swarming phase of certain species of short-horned grasshoppers. In the solitary phase these grasshoppers are innocuous and their numbers are low. However, under suitable conditions of drought followed by rapid vegetation growth, serotonin in their brains triggers a dramatic set of changes: they start to breed abundantly, becoming gregarious and nomadic when their populations become dense enough They do a lot of damage to the places where they pass, by eating the crops.

The artist Salvador Dalí was terrified of grasshoppers. As a schoolboy, he threw such violent fits of hysteria that his teacher forbade them to be mentioned in class.

Source About.com

Fly (Insect)

Naked slaves whose bodies were smeared with honey were kept close at hand by King Pepi II of Egypt to deter unwanted flies.

Frenchman Rene Descartes came up with the idea of developing the mathematical system of co-ordinates in 1619 during his military service. Lying on his bed, he watched a fly hover in the air. Descartes realized the fly's position could be described by locating its distance from three intersecting lines.

in 1912 Toronto held a flyswatting competition which was won by a 12 -year-old girl who killed 500,000 flies.

A musical fly swatter was patented in 1994. The device played two tunes, one when turned on and the other when it hit a fly.

A fly can react to something it sees and change direction in 30 milliseconds.

Flies jump backwards during takeoff.

Houseflies buzz in the key of F.

In East Africa, millions of midge flies are pressed into solid blocks and cooked into Kunga Cake.

A fly's taste buds are in its six feet. Their feet are around 10 million times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue is.

After eating, a housefly regurgitates its food and then eats it again.

A common housefly can carry up to 33 million bacteria on the outer surface of its body.

Flies are deaf.

If you swat a fly and there's a red smear, it's not blood, but in fact the pigment from its eyes.

Small animals such as flies experience time in slow motion, which is why they can avoid your newspaper swats.

The average housefly lives for about one month.

The phrase "fly on the wall" is commonly used to describe an unseen observer or listener. Its origins go back to 1920s America and it is most frequently used today to describe a form of documentary where the cameraman tries to be as unobtrusive as possible. One of the first citations of this phrase was in The Oakland Tribune, February 1921: "I'd just love to be a fly on the wall when the Right Man comes along."

Flea

The phrase 'A flea in one’s ear', meaning a stinging rebuke, refers to a common problem in the Middle Ages of being infested with fleas and other parasites. Getting a flea in the ear was particularly painful.

Queen Christina of Sweden (1626 – 1689) had a phobia about fleas. She ordered the construction of a tiny four-inch long cannon so she could spend hours firing tiny cannonballs at the fleas which infested the royal bedchamber.

When the British polymath Robert Hooke published his 1665 masterpiece, Micrographia, people were blown away by its depictions of the miniature world. Until then, few people knew that fleas had hairy legs.

The replacement of carpets and matting for rushes in Western Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century meant that there were fewer fleas in middle class homes, which thus diminished the chance of the richer classes catching the flea-borne plague.

The snow scorpionflies (Boreidae)  By I.Sáček, senior; Chiswick Chap 

Japan's entomological warfare program in China during World War II used plague-infected fleas and cholera-coated flies to kill nearly 500,000 people.

A typical hedgehog harbors up to 1,000 fleas.

Birds that live in cities have learned to line their nests with cigarette butts. Nicotine is a powerful insecticide that wards off mites, lice and fleas.

The flea can jump 350 times its body length. That is like a human jumping the length of a football field.

Female fleas cannot lay eggs until after their first blood meal and begin to lay eggs within 36-48 hours after that meal.

A female flea can consume up to fifteen times her body weight daily.

Flea allergy dermatitis (FAD) is the most common dermatologic disease among domestic dogs in the United States. 

Dragonfly

Today there are approximately 6,000 named dragonfly species in the world. This figure is only approximate because new species are constantly being discovered and described for the first time.

Dragonflies alive much of their lives in an aquatic larval stage, when they are known as nymphs before becoming adults. In some species, the nymphal stage lasts for up to five years. The nymph lives a water-bound existence where it molts (sheds skin) up to 12 times before developing wings.

A dragonfly can live for 5 years but only develops wings in its last 2-4 months of life. 

Dragonflies have two sets of wings. They can move these together or separately. This movement allows dragonflies to fly up, down, or backward, and make quick turns. They can also hover like a helicopter.

The wings of dragonflies prevent bacterial growth due to their natural structure. The surfaces of their wings are covered in nanopillars making them look like a bed of nails. When bacteria come into contact with these surfaces, their cell membranes get ripped apart immediately.

Dragonflies have a high power/weight ratio, and have been documented accelerating at 4 G linearly and 9 G in sharp turns while pursuing prey.

Dragonflies may be the most skilled predators on the planet (apart from humans). When setting off to feed on other flying insects, dragonflies manage to snatch their prey in midair more than 95 percent of the time. It is one of the highest hunting success rates in the animal kingdom (a lion's is a  mere 20%).

A dragonfly eats, on average, 300 mosquitoes per day.

Dragonflies are able to fly at more than 20 miles per hour.

The dragonfly Pantala flavescens, only 1.5 inches long, has a range of over 4,400 miles, a world record for long distance insect flight.

The treeline emerald is found in northern Alaska, within the Arctic Circle, making it the most northerly of all dragonflies

Female dragonflies avoid male attention by faking their own deaths.

Though dragonflies possess six legs, they cannot walk.

Dragonflies have 30,000 eye facets whereas houseflies only have about 6,000 and humans have three.

Cricket (Insect)

The ears of crickets and their close relatives are located on the front legs, just below the knee.

Crickets use the hair on their legs to hear low-frequency sounds. They use the hair to sense the air motions, which enables them to detect the distant low sounds.

The wart-biter cricket got its name from an old practice in which people used it to bite off warts.

At the inaugural cricket-spitting contest in Marshfield, Wisconsin, in 2009, Brian Johnsrud spat a dead cricket 22ft 8in.

At the end of the Buddy Holly song, "I'm Gonna Love You Too," there's a live cricket chirp that can be heard on the recording. Holly and the group decided to leave it in the song as it was on beat, and his band has only months earlier decided to call themselves The Crickets.

There is relationship between the air temperature and the rate at which crickets chirp. It was formulated by Amos Dolbear and published in 1897 in an article called "The Cricket as a Thermometer".  To get a rough estimate of the temperature in degrees fahrenheit, count the number of chirps in 14 seconds and then add 40.

Crickets can chew through fiberglass window screens.

Most cricket species chirp at higher rates the higher the temperature is (about 62 chirps a minute at 13 °C (55 °F) in one common species; each species has its own rate). The relationship between temperature and the rate of chirping is known as Dolbear's law.

Only male crickets chirp.

Crickets are 65%-70% protein whereas beef is 17%-40% protein.

Crickets produce 100 times fewer greenhouse gases than cows.

Source Daily Express

Cockroach

Thomas Edison developed in 1866 a device to electrocute cockroaches.

Tea made of cockroaches was a common Creole medicine for treating tetanus and other ailments in the 19th century.

The world record for cockroaches eaten is 36 in a minute by retired English rat catcher Ken Edwards on March 5, 2001.

In 2007, a Russian cockroach named Nadezhda became the first creature to give birth in space.

On January 31, 2017, doctors at Stanley Medical College and Hospital in Chennai, India, successfully removed a live, full-grown cockroach from a woman's nasal cavity. The woman, identified as Selvi, had been experiencing intense discomfort and irritation in her nose for several hours. After visiting two other hospitals without finding relief, she finally arrived at Stanley Medical College, where doctors performed a nasal endoscopy. The endoscopy revealed the surprising culprit – a live cockroach lodged deep within Selvi's nasal cavity. Using a combination of suction and forceps, the doctors carefully extracted the insect, much to Selvi's relief. Thankfully, the cockroach hadn't caused any serious damage, and Selvi made a full recovery. 

The scientific name for a group of cockroaches is called an intrusion.

Cockroaches can run on two legs, and that they can reach speeds of almost five feet per second.

A cockroach can change directions up to 25 times in a second.

Female cockroaches make eggs more quickly if they cuddle with other roaches.

Baby cockroaches are called nymphs. They are soft and white but turn hard and brown on contact with air.

Cockroaches won't eat cucumbers. This is because of a chemical in cucumbers (trans-2-nonenal) which acts as a natural repellent for ants and roaches.

A cockroach can bite with 50 times more force than its body weight.

Cockroaches can flatten themselves almost to the thinness of a piece of paper in order to slide into tiny cracks.

Much like humans, cockroaches get lonely if they don’t have companionship.

A cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death.

The world’s largest cockroach farm uses AI technology to breed six billion adult cockroaches a year.  The colony is larger than the world’s human population – and they are all for medical use. The farm is run by the Gooddoctor Pharmaceutical Group in the city of Xichang, in southwestern Sichuan province, China.

Scientists who work with cockroaches often develop allergies to cockroaches as well as chocolate and pre-ground coffee at the same time. This could be due to the fact that the FDA allows up to 60 insect fragments on average in a 100-gram sample of chocolate or coffee.

The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum may be found in Phoenix, Arizona.

Centipede

The amount of legs a centipede has varies on the species. Their number of legs varies from under 20 to over 300.

The length of the centipede's legs increase as you go down the centipede's body. This prevents the centipede from stepping on his or her legs. It also helps them to move quickly in a special rhythm.

Centipedes are not classified as insects because they have more than six legs. They are part of the arthropod family (that includes insects) and are in the myriapod class.

Worldwide, there are estimated to be 8,000 species of centipede, of which 3,000 have been described.

The most common place for centipedes to live are forests around the world. However,they also reside in caves, deserts, gardens and grasslands

The house centipede is a carnivore that feeds on cockroaches, house flies and other domestic pests. It is therefore beneficial. But because it has a scary appearance it is often exterminated.

Centipedes hunt for their food eating almost anything that is soft-bodied and in a reasonable size range. They search for spiders, worms, flies and other insects to turn into a meal. Some of the larger centipedes will even eat slugs, snails, rats and small lizards.

Centipedes come in various sizes. Some scientists are only an inch or two in length. However, some centipedes are much longer. The Amazonian giant centipede, is the largest existing species of centipede in the world, reaching over 30 cm (12 in) in length.

Despite 'centipede' meaning '100 feet,' a centipede has never been discovered with 100 legs. The closest, a species found in 1999, has 96 legs.

Centipedes move at different speeds, but some can go as fast as 20 inches per second. That is faster than many arthropods.

The house centipede can withstand falling at great speed: they reach up to 15 body lengths per second when dropped, surviving the fall.

Centipedes are relatively long-lived when compared to their insect cousins. For example,  the European Lithobius forficatus can live for 5 or 6 years.

Centipedes don't mate. Instead they leave packets of their sperm, called spermatophore, around for females to find.

Centipedes may take up to three years to be able to breed.

They are eaten by many animals. Centipedes try to defend and protect themselves by producing a sticky and smelly substance. They can also pinch their prey using their hind legs.

Some species of centipede can be hazardous to humans because of their bite. Although a bite to an adult human is usually very painful and may cause severe swelling, chills, fever, and weakness, it is unlikely to be fatal.

The Scolopendra cataracta (waterfall centipede) is a species of centipede that is currently only known to live in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. It is the first known amphibious centipede, growing to up to 20 centimetres (7.9 in) in length and with a painful venomous bite. It is commonly referred to as the "aquatic centipede". has been observed both running along stream beds and swimming with eel-like horizontal undulations of its body. Out of water, water rolls off the centipede's body leaving it dry as the surface is very hydrophobic.

Image of Scolopendra cataracta. By Original image: Warut Siriwut, Gregory D. Edgecombe. Chirasak Sutcharit, Piyoros Tongkerd, Somsak Panha; crop by EdChem - Wikipedia Commons

The Geophilus hadesi, a tiny species of centipede, has been found living in a trio of central Croatian caves. One specimen appeared some 3,600 feet beneath the Earth’s surface, the deepest a live centipede has ever been found. In homage to Hades, the scientists dubbed their creature Geophilus hadesi.

Sources Wikipedia, Yahoo! Voices