Investigation into how particular insects carry out their day to day lives, displaying amazing stories of their little lives...
Beneficial Insects...
Insects play an important role in reducing and controlling populations of both plant and insect pests by acting as predators or parasites to these detrimental organisms. There are also insects that are innately beneficial because they act as pollinators or produce products (such as bees that pollinate and produce honey) that are useful to humans, however, the scope of this guide is limited to the beneficial insects that are used for biocontrol.
Biocontrol is a natural means of controlling pests that exploits the innate tendencies of particular living organisms (in this case insects) to regulate the population of another living organism or organisms (plant and insect pests). When utilized optimally, beneficial insects can significantly reduce the need to use chemicals that can harm not only the intended pests, but also the environment, other plant life, and animal life that is not the intended target of the pesticide. Because of the role that they play, beneficial insects are of great interest in the fields of biology, agriculture, and environmental sciences. They are also of great commercial interest since they can be mass-reared and sold for profit and can significantly improve crop and garden yields.
Related terms -
Uniqueness...
Analysis of Helpful, advantageous and beneficial insects
The Honey Bee...
1. The honey bee has been around for millions of years.
2. Honey bees, scientifically also known as Apis mellifera, are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.
3. It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
4. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, includingenzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", anantioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
5. Honey bees have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
6. Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell was so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.
7. The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
8. The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
9. A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.
10. It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world.
11. A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
12. The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.
13. A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.
14. The queen bee can live up to 5 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day.
15. Larger than the worker bees, the male honey bees (also called drones), have no stinger and do no work at all. All they do is mating.
16. Each honey bee colony has a unique odour for members' identification.
17. Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but they don't leave the hive to help defend it.
18. It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.
19. Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing".
20. During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live?" ~ Albert Einstein
The Fruit fly
The fruit fly is a contradictory species. Despite its size, the tiny fruit fry can cause massive damage to crops. But the fruit fly is also a much studied animal with information that can be applied to human disease and health. The term "fruit fly" is a name given to broad range of flies which contain many species.
Fruit flies are drawn to fermenting food as a place to feed and to lay its eggs. This makes rotting fruit a good target, but also makes fruit flies attracted to fermenting beer and wine. Because of the bacteria they carry, fruit flies can get into beer and wine during these early fermentation stages and transform them into vinegar. One benefit of this affinity is that beer and wine can be used as a fruit-fly trap when they are a nuisance in the home.
In a few centuries, the fruit fly has become a go-to insect for genetic research. There are several reasons why fruit flies work so well when scientists want to study genetics and mutations. First, fruit flies are small and cheap, so many of them can be kept in a small space, enabling more experimental subjects. Second, fruit flies only live for 10 days, so changes between birth and death can be seen quickly. Finally, fruit flies have four chromosomes and similar chemical pathways to human, so the results are applicable to human health.
Male fruit flies use dance to attract mates. For such a tiny insect, the dance can be complex. According to the Orkin.com website, the male first vibrates his legs against the female's head, then both flies face each other and pull their legs from side to side. Before the male is ready to mate, it will spread its wings and twist them to get the female's attention. The result from this meeting could be up to 400 eggs at a time.
Genetic experimentation on fruit flies over a short period of time can produce some bizarre results. Fruit fries have chromosomes that are easy to manipulate, so scientists have been able to change the color of their eyes and the length of their wings easily. But other fruit fly mutations have produced fruit flies with curled wings, fruit flies with no eyes and fruit flies with legs growing out of their heads instead of antennae.
Spiders
One spider can eat 2,000 insects each year! That’s a lot of mosquitos not biting you, thanks to our eight legged friends.
Not all spiders make webs - about half of known species stalk and hunt their prey. Many of the web or "orb"weavers, however, create such distinctive patterns in their webs that their species can be determined from the web design alone.
The large and lovely orb webs found in backyard gardens were likely created by a female spider.(Talk about a web design expert!) The male orb weavers are smaller and not often seen.
There are more than 40,000 different species of spiders, and 3,500 species of spiders living in North America alone.
The largest spider in the world is the South American Goliath Birdeater spider (Theraphosa leblondi), which has a legspan of up to 10 inches and weighs more than a quarter pound hamburger!
Scientists estimate than in a field habitat, there are over 400,000 spiders living in every acre.
Spiders’ silk is tremendously strong; it can rival the tensile strength of steel and has been suggested for use in bulletproof vests.
If a young spider loses a leg, it can grow a whole new one! Testing this theory is not recommended, of course, as "playing" with a spider will send the normally shy, retreating creatures into fight or flight mode. And when flight isn't an option, bite is! (Then again, what creature wouldn't try to bite you if you cornered it and threatened to remove a limb?)
Another way spiders avoid being legless or being lunch is by playing dead! They'll drop to the ground and curl their legs up, but if you're patient, they'll eventually uncurl and scamper away.
Dragonflies
Flying insects are usually annoying. Mosquitoes bite you, leaving itchy red welts. Bees and wasps sting. Flies are just disgusting. But there’s something magical about dragonflies.
1 ) Dragonflies were some of the first winged insects to evolve, some 300 million years ago. Modern dragonflies have wingspans of only two to five inches, but fossil dragonflies have been found with wingspans of up to two feet.
2 ) Some scientists theorize that high oxygen levels during the Paleozoic era allowed dragonflies to grow to monster size.
3 ) There are more than 5,000 known species of dragonflies, all of which (along with damselflies) belong to the order Odonata, which means “toothed one” in Greek and refers to the dragonfly’s serrated teeth.
4 ) In their larval stage, which can last up to two years, dragonflies are aquatic and eat just about anything—tadpoles, mosquitoes, fish, other insect larvae and even each other.
5 ) At the end of its larval stage, the dragonfly crawls out of the water, then its exoskeleton cracks open and releases the insect’s abdomen, which had been packed in like a telescope. Its four wings come out, and they dry and harden over the next several hours to days.
6 ) Dragonflies are expert fliers. They can fly straight up and down, hover like a helicopter and even mate mid-air. If they can’t fly, they’ll starve because they only eat prey they catch while flying.
7 ) Dragonflies catch their insect prey by grabbing it with their feet. They’re so efficient in their hunting that, in one Harvard University study, the dragonflies caught 90 to 95 percent of the prey released into their enclosure.
8 ) The flight of the dragonfly is so special that it has inspired engineers who dream of making robots that fly like dragonflies.
9 ) Some adult dragonflies live for only a few weeks while others live up to a year.
10 ) Nearly all of the dragonfly’s head is eye, so they have incredible vision that encompasses almost every angle except right behind them.
11 ) Dragonflies, which eat insects as adults, are a great control on the mosquito population. A single dragonfly can eat 30 to hundreds of mosquitoes per day.
12 ) Hundreds of dragonflies of different species will gather in swarms, either for feeding or migration. Little is known about this behavior, but the Dragonfly Swarm Project is collecting reports on swarms to better understand the behavior. (Report a swarm here.)
13 ) Scientists have tracked migratory dragonflies by attaching tiny transmitters to wings with a combination of eyelash adhesive and superglue. They found that green darners from New Jersey traveled only every third day and an average of 7.5 miles per day (though one dragonfly traveled 100 miles in a single day).
14 ) A dragonfly called the globe skinner has the longest migration of any insect—11,000 miles back and forth across the Indian Ocean.
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