Insects and Spiders

Ants can carry loads many times heavier than their own body weight.

A single honeybee may visit hundreds of flowers during one foraging trip.

Butterflies taste with sensors on their feet rather than with a mouth.

A caterpillar sheds its skin several times before it becomes a chrysalis.

Spiders spin silk from glands in their abdomen, not from their mouth.

Most spiders have eight eyes, though some species have six or fewer.

Beetles make up the largest insect order, with hundreds of thousands of named species.

The wings of a housefly beat hundreds of times each second during flight.

Male crickets chirp by rubbing their wings together rather than their legs.

A honeybee colony usually has one queen, many workers, and some drones.

Ant colonies communicate through chemical trails made of pheromones left on the ground.

Termites build tall mounds that help regulate the temperature inside their nest.

A dragonfly can fly forward, backward, sideways, and hover in one spot.

A firefly produces light through a chemical reaction inside its own abdomen.

A flea can jump many times its own body length in one leap.

Mosquitoes find people partly by sensing the carbon dioxide in human breath.

A spider web is built in stages, starting with a single bridge line.

Orb webs are usually rebuilt by the spider every night or two.

A queen ant can live for many years, far longer than worker ants.

A butterfly drinks nectar through a long coiled mouthpart called a proboscis.

Each autumn, monarch butterflies migrate thousands of kilometres across North America to warmer regions.

The colony of some ant species can contain millions of individual workers.

A spider digests its prey outside the body before drinking the resulting liquid.

A cicada spends years underground as a nymph before emerging as an adult.

Grasshoppers hear with organs located on their abdomen rather than their head.

A ladybird's bright colours warn birds that it tastes unpleasant to eat.

A praying mantis relies on camouflage to blend into the leaves and stems around it.

Aphids can reproduce without mating during the warmer months of the year.

Silk from a spider web is remarkably strong for its very small thickness.

Weevils belong to the beetle family and often have a long snout.

A moth's antennae are often feathery, unlike the clubbed antennae of butterflies.

Ants have two stomachs, one for their own food and one for sharing.

Leafcutter ants carry leaf pieces underground to feed a fungus garden they farm.

A housefly tastes food with its feet before deciding whether to eat it.

Dung beetles roll balls of dung across the ground to bury them.

Worker bees cluster together and shiver to keep the hive warm in winter.

Water striders walk on ponds by spreading their weight across the surface.

A tick is not an insect but a close relative of spiders and mites.

Silverfish are small wingless insects that prefer damp and dark corners indoors.

The chirping of a cricket speeds up as the surrounding air gets warmer.

A locust swarm can form when crowded grasshoppers change both behaviour and colour.

Spiderlings disperse by releasing silk threads that carry them on the wind.

A worker bee performs different jobs as it grows older inside the hive.

Termites digest wood with the help of tiny microbes living in their gut.

A beetle's hard forewings protect the delicate flight wings folded underneath them.

Cobwebs gather dust because the abandoned silk threads stay slightly sticky indoors.

An insect's skeleton sits on the outside of its body rather than inside.

Some ants farm aphids, protecting them in return for a sweet liquid they produce.

Dragonflies hunt other insects in midair and rarely land while they feed.

A wasp nest is built from chewed wood fibres mixed with the insect's saliva.

Moths are drawn to light, though the reason is still debated among scientists.

Cockroaches breathe through small openings along their body rather than through a mouth.