All insects must have:

three body parts - a head, thorax, and abdomen

six jointed legs

two antennae to sense the world around them

an exoskeleton (outside skeleton)

95% of all the animal species on the earth are insects!

Over one million species have been discovered by scientists, and they think that there might be ten times that many that haven't been named yet!

No one really knows why insect like light. Most scientists think that bright lights confuse the insects' guidance systems so they can't fly straight any more.

Insects breathe through holes in the sides of their bodies

There are thirty-five thousand kinds of ants in the world.

There are sixty species of ants in North America.

Wood ants squirt acid from the end of their abdomens.

Wood ant workers live seven to ten years.

The queen ant has wings.

Ants have two stomachs one for them and one to feed others.

Some ants sleep seven hours a day.

The queen ant licks the eggs to make them hatch.

The queen feeds her eggs her own saliva

I took this in our garden a couple years back, wish I wouldve gotten closer, or zoomed in more.

>With over 300,000 different species, one out of every four animals on earth is a beetle.

The metallic-coloured wing covers of some beetles are used for jewelry.

The heaviest insect in the world is the Goliath beetle from Africa? A big male can weigh up to 100 grams.

The Firefly belongs to the beetle family

There are over 2000 species of fireflies living in the tropical and temperate regions.

There are nearly 5,000 different kinds of ladybugs worldwide and 400 which live in North America.

A female ladybug will lay more than 1000 eggs in her lifetime.

Ladybugs make a chemical that smells and tastes terrible so that birds and other predators won't eat them.

Some wood beetles can emerge from wood where they live after as long as 40 years

Another fine specimin from Mexico. Wish it would not have turned out so blurry.

I need to dig for more bug shots from somewhere other than Mexico. They breed em big and beautiful down there.

>A tagged Monarch butterfly was released near Ontario, Canada and was recovered 4 months later in Angangueo , Mexico. The straight line distance between these two sites is 2,133 miles.

Sphinx moths, or hawk moths, have been measured at 53 km/h. However, a horsefly (Hybomitra hinei wrighti) was recently clocked at 145 km/h! More research needs to be done in order to determine the fastest insect

Female Queen Alexandra butterflies, from Papua and New Guinea, are the largest in the world, some with wingspans larger than 26 cm.

The atlas moth, one of the largest silk moths, can be mistaken for a medium-sized bat when flying.

One Species of moth lives entirely on cow tears

Cockroaches' favorite food is the glue on envelopes and on the back of postage stamps.

A German cockroach can survive a month or more without food...but less than two weeks without water.

A cockroach can live for nine days without its head.

One female cockroach can produce two million offspring in one year. Average breeding session produces 35,0000 offspring.

The largest cockroach is Megaloblatta longipennis of Columbia (that name is not a joke...honest). The largest specimen ever recorded was a female that measured 3.81 inches long by 1.77 inches across!

The fastest land moving insects are the tropical cockroaches. They can move 50 body lengths per second. This would be equivalent to a human sprinter running the 100 yard dash in 1 second or approximately 200MPH!

The largest known variety of flea is Hystrivhopsylla schefferi. This species of flea is known from only one specimen taken from the nest of a mountain beaver. It was 1/3 of an inch long!

A flea can jump 130 times its own height

A female flea sucks up to 30 times her weight in blood per day and excretes six times her weight in flea baby food

The champion jumper is the cat flea. It has been known to leap to a height of 34 inches subjecting itself to over 200 g's!

There are 1,830 varieties of fleas.

Cat and dog fleas are closely related, but separate species. Cat fleas may be found on dogs.

A midge fly holds the record, with a wing beat of 1046 times a second.

Flies can "taste" with their feet

The house fly "hums" in the key of F

Flies like heat, light, low wind.

Adults live for about a month and produce 500 to 2,000 eggs in their life.

Flies are attracted by odors, and usually enter a building through open doors and windows near garbage and food.

Deer flies will bite a hole in your skin with their strong mandibles, put a little saliva-like material in the wound to keep the blood from clotting and lap up the blood with a sponge-like proboscis .

Beginning with one pair of house flies in April, there would be a total of 191,000,000,000,000,000,000 flies by August if all the descendants of this pair lived and reproduced normally.

Mosquitoes kill about 2 million people a year.

The mosquito's visual picture is an infrared view produced by its prey's body temperature.

The average life span of the female mosquito is 3 to 100 days; the male's is 10 to 20 days.

Mosquito adults feed on flower nectar and juices of fruits for flight energy.

The female requires a blood meal for egg development

The mosquito matures from egg to adult in 4 to 7 days.

Most mosquitoes remain within 1 mile of their breeding site.

There are 140 different kinds of mosquitoes in the world.

Female Mosquitoes are attracted to carbon-dioxide.

The husband took this picture while working in Mexico. In fact it seems our best bug shots are from there.

The fastest known insect is a dragon fly that has been clocked at 58 kilometres an hour

Dragonfly larvae use their jet butts to help them catch and eat up to 300 mosquito larvae a day.

Living scorpions reflect ultraviolet light and can glow with an eerie greenish colour when exposed to UV light, no matter what colour they appear under normal lighting conditions.

The Jungle Nymph Stick is one of the heaviest insects. In Malaysia they are often kept by people who feed them guava leaves and use the droppings to make tea.

The longest insect is a walking stick that can reach a length of 33 centimetres

The eggs of walking stick insects are among the largest in the insect world. Some eggs are more than eight millimetres long.

The song of the field cricket is temperature dependent; the tone and tempo drop with the drop in temperature. Count the chirps in 13 seconds, add 40, and you will have the approximate temperature in degrees.

The male cicada may be the loudest insect known. The mating sound can be heard as far as 440 yards.

A centipede in southern Europe has 177 PAIRS of legs

Some species of mayfly's eggs can take up to 3 years to hatch. Then have a lifespan of about 6 hours

Praying mantids are among the few insects which can rotate their heads so they can literally look over their shoulders.

In some species of praying mantis, the female begins to eat the male while they are mating. She starts at his head and by the time she reaches his abdomen, mating is completed.

There are about 1,700 varieties of praying mantis.

The female mantis lays up to 300 eggs.

The mantis will attack butterflies, bees, beetles, frogs, spiders, mice, lizards, and small birds.

The mantis has very good eyesight.

The mantis sheds its skin twelve times before it is full grown.

I was lucky enough to NOT see this one, my husband snapped the picture...

The Brazilian wandering spiders are the most venomous spiders in the world.

Tarantual wasps paralyze tarantulas and lay a single egg on the still living spider; when the egg hatches, the wasp larva has fresh food.

Tarantulas can live 30 years

the average spider web weighs 1/2000th of an ounce.