Cool Insect Facts: Learn New Things About Different Insects

Facts about Bees and Wasps

While gathering food, a bee may fly up to 60 miles in one day.
A single honeybee colony can produce around 220 lbs of honey each year
Honeybees have to make about ten million trips to collect enough nectar for production of one pound of honey.
Wasps feeding on fermenting juice have been known to get “drunk’ and pass out.
A bee’s wings beat 190 times a second, that’s 11,400 times a minute.

Houseflies find sugar with their feet, which are 10 million times more sensitive than human tongues.
Fruit flies were the first living creatures to be sent into space
Some male stoneflies do push-ups to attract a mate

Ants can lift and carry more than fifty times their own weight.
There are nearly as many species of ants as there are species of birds in the world.
Bulldog ants can leap seven times the length of their bodies!
Ant colonies can survive flood waters by clumping together to form an island

Caterpillars have 12 eyes.
Mexican Jumping Beans, sometimes sold commercially, actually have a caterpillar of a bean moth inside.
Approximately 2,000 silkworm cocoons are needed to produce one pound of silk.
It takes about one hundred Monarch Butterflies to weigh an ounce.
Butterflies taste with their feet.
The red postman butterfly develops its own poison by eating toxic plants!

A Termite Queen can lay 40,000 eggs per day.
Beetles account for 1/4 of all known species of plants and animals. There are more kinds of beetles than all plants
One dung beetle can drag 1,141 times its weight – that’s like a human pulling six double-decker buses!

Each year, scientists discover more than seven thousand new insect species.
There are about 91,000 different kinds (species) of insects in the United States. In the world, some 1.5 million different kinds (species) have been named.
About one-third of all insect species are carnivorous, and most hunt for their food rather than eating decaying meat or dung.
The oldest known fossil of an insect dates back 400 million years and is a springtail.
Insects have been present for about 350 million years, and humans for only 300,000 years.
Grasshoppers existed before dinosaurs!
Dragonflies have been on earth for 300 million years!

Grasshoppers have special organs in their hind legs that store energy for jumping.
A grasshopper’s jump, assisted with its wings, can reach a speed of up to eight miles per hour