Fascinating Facts
Insects and Spiders
1. The Female Praying Mantis
devours the male while they are mating. The male sometimes continues copulating
even after the female has bitten off his head and parts of his upper torso.
2. Ants keep slaves.
Certain species, the so-called sanguinary ants in particular. raid the
nests of other ant tribes, kill the queen, and kidnap many of the workers.
The workers are brought back to the captors hive, where they are coerced
into performing menial tasks.
3. A Horse Fly only live two
weeks.
4. Every night Wasps bite
into the stem of a plant, lock their mandibles into position, stretch
out at right angles to the stem, and, with legs dangling and fall asleep.
5. After mating, the female Black
Widow Spider turns on her partner nd devours him. The female
may dispatch as many as 25 suitors a day in this manner.
6. The Caterpillar has
more then 2,000 muscles.
7. Only female Bees work.
Males remain in the hive and literally do nothing, their only mission in
life being to fertilize the queen bee on her maiden flight. For this
purpose literally thousands of males are hatched, out of which only one
or two mate with the queen. After they have served their function,
the males are not allowed back into the hive but are left outside, where
they starve to death.
8. Spiders never spin a web
in structures made of chestnut wood. That is why so many European
Chateaux were built with chestnut beams -- spiders webs on a 50-foot beamed
ceiling can be hard to clean.
9. The animal with the largest
brain in proportion to its body size is the Ant.
10. The Honeybee kills more
people each year world-wide then poisonous snakes.
11. Bee can see ultraviolet
light.
12. Butterflies taste with
their hind feet.
13. Only female Mosquitos
bite.
14. A Flea can jump 200 times
the length of it own body. This is equivalent to a person jumping
almost a quarter of a mile.
15. Mosquitos are attracted
to the color blue twice as much as any other color.
16. It would take 27,000 Spiders,
each spinning a single web, produce a pound of web.
17. A Queen Bee may lay as
many as 3,000 eggs in a single day.
18. A Cockroach can live several
weeks with its head cut off.
19. The Bumblebee does not
die when it stings -- it can sting again and again. In bumblebee
hives, the entire colony, except for the queen, dies at the end of each
summer. Each year an entirely new colony of bees must be produced.
20. Many insects hear with their
hair. A number of insects, such as the male mosquitos, have thousands
of tiny hairs growing along antennae. When a sound in sent out, these
hairs vibrate, and the vibration is sent to the insect's central nervous
system, where it is translated into sound perceptions. Thus, in a
sense, the cockroach, whose sound receiving hairs are located on it abdomen,
"hears" with its belly. The
caterpillar, covered with hairs, "ears" over it entire body.
