Bugs & Insects Facts for Kids
Creepy-crawly facts about insects and bugs
There are an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive on Earth at any moment — that is more than a billion insects for every human.
A mosquito beats its wings approximately 600 to 1,000 times per second — the high-pitched whine you hear near your ear is the sound of those wingbeats.
Some cicada species in North America stay underground as nymphs for 17 years, feeding on tree sap, before emerging all at once to sing and mate in a huge swarm.
If you could remove all the scales from a butterfly's wing, the wing itself would be almost completely transparent — the colour and pattern come entirely from the scales.
Every worker ant you see foraging for food is female. Male ants have wings, live for only a short time, and their only role is to mate with new queens.
The bombardier beetle defends itself by mixing two chemicals in a chamber in its abdomen, producing a boiling hot, foul-smelling spray that shoots out with a popping sound.
Female praying mantises sometimes eat the male after or even during mating — the extra nutrients help the female produce more eggs.
Male moths can detect the scent of a female moth from up to 11 km (7 miles) away using their extraordinarily sensitive feathery antennae.
A honeybee queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day during peak season and may lay over one million eggs in her lifetime.
Spiders' webs are nearly invisible to flying insects, which crash into them accidentally — some spiders add zigzag patterns of silk to their webs to make them more visible to large animals like birds.