Fun Bug Facts
Mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue twice as much as to any other color.
Butterflies taste with their hind feet.
If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
Pregnant for life? It doesn't sound like much fun, but some female cockroaches mate once and are pregnant for the rest of their lives.
No food for a month--not even a crumb? Roaches can go without eating for a month but will only live a week without water.
Interesting Facts About Ants:
# Some researchers say that Fire Ants have an internal "compass" created by eating tiny bits of a mineral called magnetite, allowing them to navigate in darkness.
# African Weaver Ants can carry prey weighing more than 1000 times their own weight, hauling it back to their nest for food.
# If a 175 pound human had the comparative strength of an ant he could lift almost 9000 pounds.
# The Crazy Ant gets its name from the wild manner in which the workers run around when they are disturbed or agitated.
# When disturbed many ants spray formic acid out of their abdomen. More than 150 species of birds have been observed, picking up ants in their beaks and placing the ants in their feathers. The formic acid the ants then spray kills mites on the birds.
Interesting Facts About Cockroaches
Pregnant for life? It doesn't sound like much fun, but some female cockroaches mate once and are pregnant for the rest of their lives.
No food for a month--not even a crumb? Roaches can go without eating for a month but will only live a week without water.
Headless Horseman? Err... Horseroach? A cockroach can live a week without its head. It only dies because without a mouth, it can't drink water.
Cockroaches have at least 18 knees.
Cockroaches are some of the most ancient insects. Fossil records show their relatives have been around, virtually unchanged in appearance, for over 350 million years.
Recent studies have confirmed that cockroaches are a major cause of allergies and asthma. In some inner city areas up to 45% of the children are allergic to roaches, and many of them have developed asthma as a result of constant exposure.
Cockroaches have been found to carry, on their bodies, the pathogens that cause tuberculosis, cholera, leprosy, dysentery, and typhoid, as well as over 40 other bacteria or viruses that can cause disease.
Doctors in some inner city areas report that one-half of the foreign objects they remove from children's ears are cockroaches.
Cockroaches will feed on people!! They feed at night when people are sleeping, consuming protein materials such as eyebrows and fingernails.
Cockroaches are among the fastest land-moving insects. They are capable of moving 50 body lengths each second! If a human had this potential he could run a 100 yard dash in 1 second, reaching a speed of 200 miles per hour.
Cockroaches can detect changes in barometric pressure, and thus instinctively know when a severe rainstorm is imminent. In Bermuda, about an hour before a downpour, thousands of cockroaches have been observed running across the roads.
Cockroach populations can be huge:
1. in 1965 in Indiana over 6,000 cockroaches were found in a single beer carton
2. in 1947 a 4-room apartment in Texas was treated, and over 100,000 roaches killed
3. in 1967 a treatment killed 133 pounds of American Cockroaches that were living in the cage around a Chicago zoo's prize gorilla
4. an estimated 1 million or more cockroaches were living in a house in New York, along with a family, 24 dogs, 20 cats, 2 mice, and a parrot. The house was so saturated with roaches that they had flowed out over the lawns, tree trunks, and walls of nearby homes, and into the sewers. This happened in 1979.
Interesting Facts About Spiders:
# The largest spider in the world is a species of tarantula found in South America - Theraphosa leblondi - where one specimen had a leg span of over 11 inches.
# The most dangerous spider to humans may be the Sydney Funnel Web Spider - Atrax robustus - whose venom is so potent and fast-acting that they could potentially kill a small child within 15 minutes. Since an anti-venom was developed for them there have been no more human deaths.
# D.A.R.E. to say "No" to Drugs. Spiders that were subjected to various drugs were noticeably affected:
1. Spiders that ate flies injected with caffeine spun "nervous" webs
2. Spiders that ate flies injected with LSD spun webs with wild, abstract patterns instead of the beautiful, symmetrical webs they normally do.
3. Spiders given sedatives dozed off before completing the web making job.
Interesting Facts About Wasps and Bees
Honeybees may make 10,000,000 trips to gather enough nectar to make a single pound of honey. The total distance traveled by all the bees to create this much honey may equal twice the distance around the world. Their activity for this single pound of honey means a total distance flown of 55,000 miles and over 2,000,000 flowers visited.
The term "honeymoon" comes from the Middle Ages, when a newly married couple was provided with enough honey wine to last them for the first month of their new life together.
When searching for food sources a honeybee may travel up to 60 miles in a single day.
The wings of honeybees beat over 11,000 cycles per minute, but their average flying speed is only around 15 miles per hour.
The average American eats a little over 1 pound of honey each year.
A queen bee can lay her weight in eggs each day, laying 1 per minute, all day and all night, for a total of 1,500 eggs in 24 hours, and 200,000 in a year. One reason for this is survival, for if the workers have detected a pause in their Queen's egg laying they will immediately begin the process of creating a replacement.
A single female yellowjacket begins a new colony each spring, and if all goes well she may have over 25,000 of her daughters working in the expanded colony by the end of the summer.
The Africanized Honey Bee (a.k.a. "killer bee") have been known to chase people for over a quarter of a mile once they have gotten excited and aggressive.
