Useless Facts on Insects And Spiders
A house fly lives only two weeks.
The female praying mantis devours the male while they are mating. The male sometimes continues copulating even after the female has bitten his head and part of his upper torso!
A male spider's penis is located at the end of one of its legs.
Ants keep slaves. Certain species, the so-called sanguinary ants in particular, raid the nests of other ant tribes, kill the queen, and kidnap many of the workers. The workers are brought back to the captors' hive, where they are coerced into performing menial tasks.
Every night, wasps bite into the stem of a plant, lock their mandibles into position, stretch out at right angles to the stem, and, with legs dangling, fall asleep.
In rainy climates, some breeds of termites attach special overhanging eaves to their nests. These eaves deflect downpours and keep the nests dry. The compass termite, an Australian breed, builds its nest in the shape of an axe head, the sides of which always point north and south. African termites in search of water will bore holes as deep as 130 feet into the Earth until they find the water table.
After mating, the female black widow turns on her partner and devours him. The female may dispatch as many as twenty-five suitors a day in this manner.
Termites are not related to ants. They are part of the cockroach family.
In a beehive, only 1 and a half ounces of wax are used to build a comb that will hold 4 pounds of honey.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the best time to spray household insects is at 4:00 pm. Insects are most active and vulnerable at this time.
Only female bees work. Males remain in the hive and literally do nothing, their only mission in life being to fertilize the queen bee on her maiden flight. For this purpose literally thousands of males are hatched, out of which only one or two mate with the queen. After they have served their function, the males are not allowed back into the hive but are left outside, where they starve to death.
Flies prefer to breed in the center of a room. This is why experts advise placing flypaper away from corners.
Queen termites may live for fifty years.
The Mexican fishing spider attaches itself to a small leaf, floats across a pond as if on a raft, and from this vantage point hunts its prey, large tadpoles and small fish.
Cockroaches have lived on Earth for 250 million years without changing in any way whatsoever.
The caterpillar has more than 2,000 muscles.
The deer botfly can fly faster than a jet plane. It has been clocked at a speed of 818 miles per hour. It crosses 400 yards in once second and moves 13 miles in a minute. The deer botfly flies so fast that it is almost invisible to the human eye.
There are more beetles on Earth than any other living creature. The number of species alone is nearly a quarter-million (the United States has 28,000 species)
A grasshopper can leap over obstacles 500 times its own height. In relation to its size it has the greatest jumping ability of all creatures.
An ant can lift 50 times its own weight. A bee can handle 300 times its own weight, which is equivalent to a human being pulling a 10 ton trailer.
There are 5 million different species of insects in the world. The insect population of the world is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. The weight of the world's insect population exceeds that of man by a factor of twelve.
The animal with the largest brain in proportion to its body size is the ant.
The honeybee kill more people each year world-wide than poisonous snakes.
Bees can see ultraviolet light.
Butterflies taste with their hind feet.
There are more than 100,000 different species of butterflies.
The leaf-cutter ant sometimes makes anthills 16 feet deep and an acre wide.
A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off. The common house fly cannot survive in Alaska. It is too cold. Those that do appear there are brought in by boat or plane and perish without reproducing. Mosquitoes, on the other hand, love cold weather. Specimens have been found near the North Pole.
The bumblebee does not die when it stings—it can sting again and again. In bumblebee hives, the entire colony, except for the queen, dies at the end of each summer. Each year an entirely new colony of bees must be produced.
If one places a minute amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
Only female mosquitoes bite.
A flea can jump 200 times the length of its own body. This is equivalent to a person jumping almost a quarter of a mile.
Mosquitoes are attracted to the color of blue twice as much as to any other color.
A male emperor moth can detect and find a female of his species a mile away.
It would take 27,000 spiders, each spinning a single web, to produce a pound of web.
Bees have five eyes. There are three small eyes on the top of a bee's head and two larger ones in front.
A queen bee may lay as many as 3,000 eggs in a single day.
Ants stretch when they wake up. They also appear to yawn in a very human manner before taking up the tasks of the day.
In September, 1951, seventeen-month-old Mark Bennet of Vancouver, B.C., was stung 447 times by wasps and lived. He was released from the hospital after twenty days of treatment.
Cicadas have their hearing organs in their stomaches, at the base of the abdomen. Crickets have their hearing organs in their knees, or, more precisely, in the oval stilts of their forelegs.
The bombardier beetle, when disturbed, defends itself by emitting a series of explosions, sometimes setting off four or five reports in succession. The noises sound like miniature popgun blasts and are accompanied by a cloud of reddish-colored, vile-smelling fluid.
Spiders never spin webs in structures made of chestnut wood. That is why so many European Chateux were built with chestnut beams—spider webs on a 50 foot beamed ceiling can be difficult to clean!
The reason a fly swatter is an efficient tool for killing flies while the human hand is not is as follows: a fly's tactile sense is controlled by numerous sensory hairs covering its entire body. These hairs are especially sensitive to air pressure. The movement of a hand or any other solid object creates fluctuations of air and warns the fly well in advance of the blow. The fly swatter, however, has many holes arranged along its surface, so that it displaces little air as it bears down on its victim. Thus the fly is caught unaware.