insecta

Insecta

Ant (394)
Bee (762)
Beetle (480)
Bug (573)
Butterfly (845)
Caddice fly (5)
Cockroach (395)
Dragonfly (27)
Earwig (1)
Flea (17)
Flies (872)
Grasshopper (168)
Insecta (2067)
Louse (2)
Mayfly (3)
Neuroptera (6)
Phasmid (4)
Sawfly (1)
Stone fly (1)
Termite (65)
Thrip (13)
Wasp (181)

Already, urban moths have evolved changes in shade suiting their dull concrete habitat (compared with the tree trunks they used to live among),

there are now new varieties of urban rat, housemouse and cockroach. If you would like to comment on this story

but to bring it into line with the world of computers, fly-by-wire and digital technology.

One of the more popular moments at the event was a replay of a videotaped TED 2012 talk by University of Pennsylvania Professor Vijay Kumar on swarming drones, titled"Robots that fly...

Yet these little insects are causing a buzz by helping thousands of rural farmers in East Africa.

For the past twelve years, Kenyan social business Honey Care Africa has developed its innovative Ëoebusiness in a Beehive'model that has allowed low-income farmers to easily earn more money by producing honey.

The package gives farmers everything they need to start producing honey-a beehive, equipment, training, hive maintenance,

A simple beehive requires just 1 sq m (10 sq ft of land and two to three hours of labor per month.

"It's the only food that insects produce that humans eat regularly, it's packed with healthy micro-nutrients,

You need honeybees, space, wild flowers and ample time to for the bees to pollinate and produce it.

Sweet bonusin East Africa there are plenty of honeybees ready to meet the growing demand. But

Its package costs around $50 for two hives, and it has partnered with micro lending institutions like Kiva. org

Farmers can earn on average 15,000 Kenyan shillings ($175) per year from two hives, making their return on investment substantial.

but like the idea of a sweet income, by hiring fulltime beekeepers within villages to manage individual farmers hives.

and invest in more livestock-or hives. Shelf lifealthough beekeeping is a traditional oe and relatively low-tech business oe the organization is beginning to bring it into the 21st Century.

which allows a fleet of beekeeping technicians who inspects hives across the country to enter troves of live data on farmers,

hives, honey and harvesting into Samsung smartphones. This information feeds into a central dashboard, which helps the company track production

Alerts encourage regular hive inspection, whilst analytics automatically highlight opportunities and trends. The app also allows global consumers to connect more with Kenyan beekeepers,

and seeing the family trees and hives that produced, along with harvest date all on your screen."

But the real maths wizards of the animal kingdom are the ants of the Tunisian desert (Cataglyphis fortis). They count both arithmetic and geometry as parts of their mathematical toolkit.

the ant can use one of two tricks for finding its way home, visual landmarks or scent trails.

So evolution endowed the desert ant with a secret weapon: geometry. Armed with its mathematical know-how,

the desert ant is able to"path integrate Â. This means, according to ant navigation researchers Martin Muller and Rudiger Wehner,

These desert ants calculate the distance walked by counting steps. Researchers discovered this by strapping stilts made of pig hairs onto the legs of the ants.

The ant's stilts made each individual step longer than it would have otherwise been,

making them overestimate the distance home. The ants calculate the direction they walk by calculating the angle of their path relative to the position of the sun,

using the same rules of trigonometry that were taught to me in the tenth grade. And what's more, the ants constantly update their calculations to correct for the sun's march across the sky.

All that in a nervous system comprised of as few as 250 000 neurons (compared to the approximately 85 billion neurons in the human.

Near the end of spring or the beginning of summer, honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies grow too large for their hives,

The mother queen and half of the worker bees leave the hive to seek a new location,

while the daughter queen and the remaining workers remain in place. Minutes later, the departed group identifies a temporary resting place on a nearby tree branch,

and from there it surveys the local real estate. Several hundred scouts fan out in all directions in search of a suitable location for a new hive.

each scout communicates the location of the space they found by performing a waggle dance in front of their hive mates.

as if they were participating in some insect version of Dancing with the Stars. Some simply stop dancing,

however, is that the"hive mind Â can make complex decisions only because the work is distributed across multiple individuals.

A female honey bee becomes queen based on what she eats in the first days of her life

(though worker bees do seem to have some influence over who becomes queen, giving honey bees the most humanlike election process).

But group decision-making is not unique to our species. Even the smallest worker bee, the youngest Tonkean macaque,

Will we ever Â get rid of bed bugs? Nothing makes the skin crawl more than the idea that tiny bloodsucking bugs could be living in our bedrooms.

Around the size of a lentil, the common bed bug*,Cimex lectularius, can drink up to seven times its own weight in blood in one feeding,

leave nasty, itchy bumps on their human hosts, and hide unseen for months on end.

Since the late 1990s, the bed bug has become an increasingly common urban nuisance in homes and hotels worldwide.

A 2010 survey from the University of Kentucky and the National Pest Management Association found that 95%of US pest control companies had treated a bed bug infestation in the previous year

Only last month, New york's Department of health and Mental hygiene, a resource for other people with bed bug infestations, had to fumigate one of its floors.

According to the survey, the majority of pest control operators from Europe, Africa, Australia and North america said bed bugs were the most difficult insect pest to control, more so than ants, termites and even the formidable cockroach.

bed bug treatments grew by a quarter each year between 2000 and 2006. The worst aspect about this is that we thought we had tackled the bed bug problem before.

Clive Boase a pest management consultant in Suffolk and author of the London survey, says that UK bedbug numbers began decreasing in the 1930s, thanks to changes in social housing and public health policies,

which led to the demolition of old publicly-funded housing and teams of inspectors checking homes for vermin, respectively.

Or, is there any relief to be found in the myriad bed bug products and services on the market, from growth regulators to heat treatments?

an entomologist and bed bug expert from Virginia Tech, are"not practical to use in a widespread way because of the cost.

Because bed bugs live primarily in the bedroom, chemical companies must provide extensive toxicity data to prove it is safe for indoor use,

Even if making a new bed bug insecticide were lucrative, there are other challenges. There is the problem of figuring out how a chemical has to function in order to best kill bed bugs cheaply, efficiently and safely.

This requires intimate knowledge of the bed bug's basic biology. But, because bed bugs were at such low levels for decades,

interest in studying them waned. Starting in the early 2000s, once it was clear the resurgence was real

and that bed bugs weren't going anywhere, scientists had to relearn bed bug basics from scratch, starting with fundamental aspects as how to raise them in a lab. Then there is the problem of paying for the research.

While dozens of labs now work on the basic science of bed bugs worldwide, funding remains low in part

because bed bugs are known not to spread disease. Finally, there is the problem of insecticide resistance. Even DDT, the supposed miracle cure, wasn't immune to this.

Five years after the pesticide was in widespread use in the US, DDT-resistant bed bugs popped up in Hawaii;

in the 1950s and 1960s, resistant strains were found elsewhere in the US and in Japan, Korea, Iran, Israel and French guiana,

to name a few. No chemical insecticide is immune to resistance, particularly if it is overused. Today, roughly 90%of bed bugs have a genetic mutation that makes them resistant to pyrethroids,

a class of insecticides commonly used for bed bugs that work in a similar way to DDT. Stopping spread So,

chemicals are not the sole answer. Neither, it seems, are any other options when used alone."

where they are used sometimes sparingly along with heat treatments (bed bugs die at 45c), desiccants such as silica gel and diatomaceous earth that fatally dry the bugs out,

Insect growth regulators, or IGRS, are chemicals that prevent bed bugs from completing their lifecycle, stunting their growth so they can't reproduce.

But IGRS are slow-acting, and the bugs will still bite even if they can't breed.

On the horizon, perhaps, are modified genetically versions of symbiotic bacteria that live in the insect's gut,

including Wolbachia, which may be exploited for pest management. Or, the bugs'pheromones, which tell them where to go

and who to mate with, may also be used reengineered and against them. In the meantime, public awareness measures can keep bed bugs from spreading.

Good practices include: checking hotel room beds before unpacking, being mindful of belongings like a coat draped carelessly on an unknown couch,

and box springs in encasements specifically intended to keep away bed bugs, which may make the bed easier to treat

Â But, with cheaper tools, we may be able to knock bed bug levels back down everywhere. Or at least, he adds,

Entomologists always use two words for insects that are true to the common name they have oe so for example,

house fly is two words because those are actually flies, but butterfly is one word

because they aren't flies. If you would like to comment on this article or anything else you have seen on Future,

Best of the web: Planets, pandemics and powerthe vanishing groves Ross Andersen Aeon 16 october 2012 A superb essay on the world's oldest trees, the bristlecone pines of California,

and their interaction with humans, land and climate. They live high up in small alpine pockets;

their record is one of astonishing endurance in inhospitable climates. In times of drought they virtually shut down,

butterflies and All but, says Harris, the conclusions the doctor drew from his sublime adventures seemed alarmingly unscientific.

trees from which they harvest a particularly delicious and tradable species of caterpillar. People are equipped with touchscreen devices with icons for various options like"valuable tree Â that they can select

a trend it shares with other perilous beasts from wasps to snakes. And it occurs to me,

a disintegration that is assisted by microorganisms, insects and lichen. This organic matter decays, feeding more organisms, including, in time, plants.

and attracts microorganisms, worms and insects, which help maintain soil fertility and provide ecosystem services.

and Bruce Beutler, an immunologist and mammalian geneticist at The Scripps Research Institute, describes how researchers have used common approaches to tease apart the secrets of immunity in species ranging from fruit flies to rice.

Their overview in Science includes illustrated descriptions of the disease-resistance or immunity pathways in the mouse, Drosophila fruit fly,

These represent the immune defense systems of vertebrates, insects, monocotyledons (grasslike plants) and dicotyledons (plants like beans that have seed two leaves.)

such as a virus, perhaps with the help of a sap-sucking insect, says Professor Bengtsson.

The researchers uncovered extensive molecular differences in the brains of worker bees and queen bees which develop along very different paths when put on different diets.

and queens to produce their extraordinarily different behaviors. This finding is not only crucial, but far reaching,

more than 550 genes are marked differentially between the brain of the queen and the brain of the worker,

¢Deep Fried Insects Topping off the list of specialty foods is this protein-rich delicacy from Thailand,

locusts, grasshoppers, cockroaches, ants and maggots, just to name a few. As for me, please pass the barf bag.

#Mystery of the Honeybees Solved Members of a joint United states army-University of Montana research team that located a virus that is possibly collapsing honeybee colonies.

what is killing off the honeybees? Since 2006,20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United states alone have suffered oecolony collapse.

suggesting that insect nutrition is compromised somehow. Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course.

a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines. But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department

One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die they fly off in every direction from the hive,

Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death.

is a kind of insect insanity. In any event, the universitys bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year,

#Why Elephants Are Afraid of Ants and Not Mice Elephants are terrified more of ants than mice.

Mice are supposed to strike terror into the hearts of elephants-at least if Disney cartoons are to be believed.

Researchers have discovered that ants are the bane of elephants lives, with the giants of the African savannah steering clear of trees infested with them just in case they crawl up their sensitive trunks.

The experts who made the discovery believe ants act as bodyguards for some plants to keep trampling elephants at bay.

where these little ants are up against these huge herbivores, protecting trees and having a major impact on the properties of the ecosystems in

Swarming groups of ants that weigh about 5mg each can and do protect trees from animals that are about a billion times more massive,

The discovery that elephants dislike ants came when Dr Palmer and colleague Dr Jacob Goheen noticed elephants avoiding a species of acacia tree in the Kenyan plains.

if they were home to guardian ants. The elephants avoided those trees like a kid avoids broccoli,

It seems that elephants simply do not like ants swarming up the insides of their trunks and I cant say I blame them.

Science Daily reports that despite their numbers and status as an important pollinator sweat bees are tough to study

and insects that were introduced by humans to correct an imbalance, and species that were endangered once

and why the animal or insect is considered costly: 1. Canada Geese for endangering public health by soiling parks and lakes,

Rounding out the bottom five are killer bees, starlings, mountain pine beetles, brown tree snakes and Asian mongooses.

#New Study Suggests Exposure to Pesticides Prime Cause of ADHD Organophosphate pesticides are used widely in the United states to control insects on food crops.

because the pesticides are designed to attack the nervous systems of insects. It is not surprising, then,

which are used widely in the United states to control insects on food crops. Epidemiologist Brenda Eskenazi of UC Berkeley and her colleagues have been studying more than 300 Mexican American children living in the heavily agricultural Salinas Valley.

the bees in the citys 400 and counting hives produce an average of 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of honey each year,

#Insects Sense Danger on Mammals Breath When plant-eating mammals such as goats chomp on a sprig of alfalfa,

they could easily gobble up some extra protein in the form of insects that happen to get in their way.

But a new report in the August 10th issue of Current Biology, shows that plant-dwelling pea aphids have designed a strategy to help them avoid that dismal fate:

The insects sense mammalian breath and simply drop to the ground. oetiny insects like aphids are not helpless

Inbar said he had wondered always about accidental predation of small plant-dwellers based on his observations of insects that dont really move around. oeas soon as we started to work on this problem,

we suspected that the aphids responded to our own breath, he said. The researchers later used snorkels to keep their own breath from mucking up their experiments.

The researchers allowed a goat to feed on potted alfalfa plants infested with aphids. oestrikingly, 65 percent of the aphids in the colonies dropped to the ground right before they would have been eaten along with the plant,

the researchers write. That mass dropping might have been triggered by many cues: plant shaking, sudden shadowing,

While a quarter of the aphids dropped when plants were shaken, more than half fell to the ground in response to a lambs breath, the researchers report.

Shadows had no effect on the aphids dropping behavior. Ladybugs, an insect enemy of aphids, didnt inspire that kind of synchronous response either.

Further studies with an artificial breath apparatus allowed the researchers to test what it was about the breath that tipped the aphids off.

It turned out it wasnt carbon dioxide or other known chemical ingredients found on mammalian breath. Only when the controlled airstream was both warm and humid did it lead to impressive dropping rates of 87 percent in a room with otherwise low humidity Inbar said that the aphids oeelegant solution to the problem of incidental

predation is practiced likely by other species as well. oethis remarkable response to mammalian-specific cues, in spite of the inherent cost of an aphids dropping off the plant, points to the significance of mammalian herbivory to plant-dwelling insects,

the researchers concluded. oewe predict that this sort of escape behavior in response to mammalian breath may be found among other invertebrates that live on plants

#Saving the Planet by Eating Insects and Other Creepy Crawlies A Chinese woman selling scorpions on stick in Beijing,

the trick may be to switch our diet to insects and other creepy-crawlies. The raising of livestock such as cows, pigs and sheep occupies two-thirds of the worlds farmland

A policy paper on the eating of insects is being considered formally by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

an entomologist at Wageningen University in The netherlands and the author of the UN paper, says eating insects has advantages. oethere is a meat crisis,

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO,

he cant be dismissed as a crank. oemost of the world already eats insects, he points out. oeit is only in the western world that we dont.

Grasshoppers The advantages of this diet include insects high levels of protein, vitamin and mineral content.

shows that farming insects produces far less greenhouse gas than livestock. Breeding commonly eaten insects such as locusts,

crickets and meal worms, emits 10 times less methane than livestock. The insects also produce 300 times less nitrous oxide, also a warming gas

and much less ammonia, a pollutant produced by pig and poultry farming. Being cold-blooded, insects convert plant matter into protein extremely efficiently,

Van Huis says. In addition, he argues, the health risks are lower. He acknowledges that in the west eating insects is a hard sell:

oeit is very important how you prepare them, you have to do it very nicely, to overcome the yuk factor.

More than 1, 000 insects are known to be eaten by choice around the world, in 80%of nations.

They are most popular in the tropics, where they grow to large sizes and are easy to harvest.

Durst helped set up an insect farming project FAO project in Laos which began in April.

whose favourite is fried wasp oevery crispy and a nice light snack. oebut this is crazy when most Asians are lactose intolerant.

Locusts and crickets are calcium-rich and 90%of people in Laos have eaten insects at some point,

Durst says the FAOS priority will be to boost the eating of insects where this is already accepted

and protect forests where many wild insects are collected. oei can see a step-by-step process to wider implementation.

insects could be used to feed farmed animals such as chicken and fish which eat them naturally.

One of the few suppliers of insects for human consumption in the UK is Paul Cook,

LOCAL TREATS Thailand Dishes include fried giant red ants, crickets and June beetles Colombia oefat-bottomed ants are a popular snack,

fried and salted Papua new guinea Sago grubs in banana leaves are a local delicacy Ghana Winged termites are collected and fried, roasted,

or made into bread Japan Dishes include aquatic fly larvae in sugar and candied grasshoppers Mexico The agave worm is eaten on tortillas,

and grasshoppers are toasted Cambodia Deep-fried tarantulas are popular with locals and tourists South africa Locusts lend interest to the staple dish of cornmeal porridge Australia Witchetty grubs are a traditional part of the Aboriginal diet Via Guardian Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati

#Milk from the Offspring of a Cloned Cow Being sold in British Stores A British dairy farmer said he was using milk from a cow bred from a clone Milk from the offspring of a cloned cow is being sold in British shops,

and warbles of wild birds and match them against a database of bird sounds to help the oereader identify the species

The risk is that we become mindless ants following endless crumbs of digital data. oepeople tend to ask

and when one lone ladybug sat through Mary poppins, evolution took another tiny step forward...In the future, the square fruit in the grocery store will be found next to the square vegetables and the square poultry sections...

A zoo run by flies is such a zoo. No really...When you look at yourself in the mirror,

no toilet and no running water for the five people who live in this mosquito-infested hut in Bamako, the capital of Mali.

#A Caterpillar That Pretends to be a Fearsome Snake This small caterpillar with bold yellow

but this rearing creature is actually a small caterpillar with a cunning means of defence.

Pics) The brightly coloured insect, which is only a few inches long, was snapped by wildlife biologist Jonathan Mays in Maine,

U s. He was photographing the striking caterpillars and the large black and orange butterflies they turn into in a red maple forest.

Mr Mays, said: Swallowtail caterpillars are beautiful creatures. They strike a sense of wonder from many observers.

Swallowtails have spots on their head that mimic snake eyes and are amazing to view. The disguise is very lifelike,

I was at this site looking specifically for the caterpillars. The caterpillar can also emit a pungent scene

if a predator gets too close The photographs show two different Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillars. One was found moving to a new feeding position

while another was spotted inside its leaf retreat. The caterpillars also have a few other tricks to keep them safe.

When they first hatch out, the tiny caterpillars look like little brown bird droppings. They spend most of the day folded up inside leaves as they develop.

The caterpillar turns into a striking black and orange butterfly. Finally the caterpillar has forked a, fleshy organ just above its head,

Mr Mays said: Im pleased with the photographs. The sharp angles and depth of field really accentuate the eye spots

The caterpillars live in folded leaf shelters and eat the leaves of the sassafras or spicebush.

The growing use of mobile telephones is behind the disappearance of honey bees and the collapse of their hives,

and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives. Now researchers from Chandigarhs Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline:

and productivity of bees in two hives one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months.

After three months the researchers recorded a dramatic decline in the size of the hive fitted with the mobile phon, a significant reduction in the number of eggs laid by the queen bee.

The queen bee in the oemobile hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.

They also found a dramatic decline in the number of worker bees returning to the hive after collecting pollen.

Because of this the amount of nectar produced in the hive also shrank. Ved Prakash Sharma and Neelima Kumar, the authors of the report in the journal Current Science, wrote:

Honeybee behaviour and biology has been affected by electrosmog since these insects have magnetite in their bodies

which helps them in navigation. oethere are reports of sudden disappearance of bee populations from honeybee colonies.

The reason is still not clear. We have compared the performance of honeybees in cellphone radiation exposed

and unexposed colonies. oea significant decline in colony strength and in the egg laying rate of the queen was observed.

The behaviour of exposed foragers was influenced negatively by the exposure there was neither honey nor pollen in the colony at the end of the experiment.

Tim Lovett, of The british Beekeepers Association, said that hives have been successful in London where there was high mobile phone use. oeprevious work in this area has indicated this mobile phone use is not a real factor,

The UK Government has set aside £10 million for research into the decline of pollinators like bees,

with more than half of hives dying out over the last 20 years. The most recent statistics from last winter show that the decline in honey bees in Britain is slowing

with just one in six hives lost. This is still above the natural rate of ten per cent losses,

There has been an increase in the number of thefts of hives across the world and in Germany beekeepers have started fitting GPS tracking devices to their hives.

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