Interesting Insect Facts

I don’t know what compelled me to compile this list, but I was reading some little bit of insect trivia and I got off on a tear.

Not only did I compile a bunch of insect trivia, but you can look forward to a series of other interesting trivia topics to come…

• There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth.
• There are more than 900,000 known species of insects in the world.
• More people are killed each year from bees than from snakes.
• Beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms like fried bacon.
• Some worms will eat themselves if they can’t find any food!
• Bees must collect the nectar from two thousand flowers to make one tablespoonful of honey. In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.
• Tapeworms range in size from about 0.04 inch to more than 50 feet in length.
• A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
• In Africa swarms of Locusts may contain as many as 28,000,000,000 individuals. A large swarm may eat up to 80,000 tons of grain and other vegetation in a day.
• Amazon ants (red ants found in the western U.S.) steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. The slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who cannot do anything but fight.
• Each year, insects eat 1/3 of the Earth’s food crop.
• Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes. Only female mosquitoes bite because they need the protein from blood to produce their eggs and she can triple her body weight with just one meal of blood.
• Only full-grown male crickets can chirp.
• Dragonflies have as many as 30,000 lenses in each eye.
• A tabanid fly, related to horse flies, has been clocked at 90 miles per hour.
• The fastest runners are cockroaches, which can move almost a foot per second. However this only translates to a little over 1 mph.
• The queen of a termite colony may lay 6,000 to 7,000 eggs per day, and may live 15 to 50 years.
• Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
• Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.
• The total distance of the many trips honey bees travel to produce a pound of honey is about equal to twice the distance around the world.
• There are more than 200 million insects for each human on the planet.

Now, after reading all those insect facts do you have the sudden urge to itch?

By the way, I’m no entomologist, so you might want to double check anything you see listed here before you go citing it anywhere. I did NOT vet these “facts” – still, they’re fun aren’t they? :-)