Interesting Bug Facts...creepy but true!

Butterflies taste with their feet. They do not taste for themselves however. Most butterflies can’t eat as they don’t have regular insect mouths or teeth, instead they have a long tube like a straw that they suck up the nectar with. They use their feet to taste leaves to see if it is a suitable for their progeny, caterpillars, to eat. If they deem it suitable for their babies, they will lay their eggs there.

Houseflies also taste with their feet and the taste organs on their feet are 10 million times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue. They don’t have teeth so their mouths suck up food much like a sponge. If a particular food isn’t liquid enough they spit or vomit on it, which liquidizes it, and they drink it up. Their favourite food is animal waste so they carry lots of germs. For this reason and the spitting thing, it is a good idea to do your best to keep them away from your food.

Honeybees are hard workers;they can fly up to sixty miles a day when foraging for food. They make ten to fifteen trips a day and visit up to one hundred flowers per trip.They must fly over fifty five thousand miles to make one pound of honey. Africanized honeybees, also known as Killer Bees, will chase an enemy over one quarter of a mile. Modern science says it is aerodynamically impossible for honeybees to fly. Well, if the scientists say that, they better show some respect and darn well stop flying!

Mosquitoes kill about two million people a year. They have killed more people than all of our wars put together. They carry deadly diseases like Malaria, Dengue Fever, Dog Heartworm and West Nile Virus. But it is only the females who are the blood suckers as they need a meal of blood to lay fertile eggs. The male’s main source of food is nectar and decomposing plant material.

Wasps are not bees. They do not produce honey and they make their nests out of wood and mud. Unlike bees, wasps do not die when they sting and can sting multiple times. When a wasp stings, its venom gives off a certain pheromone that causes other wasps to become more aggressive. Wasps have been known to get drunk off of fermenting fruit. Doesn’t that sound like fun; drunken aggressive bees egging each other on.

One female cockroach can produce up to two million offspring a year. One of their favourite foods is the glue on the back of envelopes and stamps, but they will eat almost anything including leather, wallpaper, books, hair, their own droppings and each other. A fairly new type of poison is taking advantage of this. The cockroach ingests the poison, dies, his buddies eat him and they in turn die. Here is an odd fact about cockroaches: a cockroach can live and respond for up to two weeks after being decapitated. The reason for this is they breathe through little holes in each segment of their body. They don’t have the high blood pressure or huge network of blood vessels a human does so they don’t bleed to death. Also their nervous system is not centralized. The lonely head can survive for several hours too.

Most of us remember trying to catch grasshoppers as children, but these usually harmless creatures can have a very dark side. When conditions become crowded, and food becomes scarce they can turn into locusts. They change physically too, their usual green color becoming dark brown and they develop large muscles. In laboratory conditions, this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde change can happen in as little as two hours. They become so different from grasshoppers that up until 1921 they were thought to be different species. But, it is their behaviour change which is so devastating. Usually solitary creatures, they begin to swarm.

The swarms can cover many square kilometres; the largest ever recorded was in Kenya, and it covered 200 square kilometres. It is estimated that, that paticular swarm had 10 billion individuals. As they eat the equivalent in their own weight each day, the resulting devastation to crops is nothing short of disastrous. These swarms have even brought on famines that have lasted for years. It is estimated that their destruction affects the livelihood of one in ten people on the planet.

There is some good news though. There are only ten species of grasshoppers which undergo this change, most notably, the Desert Locust. And recent research has discovered a brain chemical called serotonin is responsible for causing this change. With this discovery, researches are looking for a way to control the chemical change, and, therefore, avoid the swarms altogether.

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