A quick look at the world of insects …

At Kawaii Animals we love all creatures … but some are a little harder to love than others.  We don’t necessarily love all insects as much as some other animals for example.  But insects are fascinating and diverse.  Here are some amazing insect facts courtesy of the internet:

• There are billions of insects, approximately 1.5 billion insects for every person, and we don’t even know how many species of insect exist. To put it in perspective:
  • There are more than 22,000 different kinds of insects in Britain.
  • One per cent of all insects are ants.  Their biomass alone exceeds that of all the humans that have ever existed.
  • There are more insects in one square mile of empty field than there are people in the world.
  • Beetles are the most common insects on the planet.New beetles are discovered at a rate of one an hour.  There are 350,000 named beetles.  If you lined up all the animal and plant species in a row, every fifth one would be a beetle.
• Insects have an amazing ability to survive anywhere from the polar regions to the deserts.
• Adult dragonflies have the biggest eyes of all insects and there are fossil dragonflies dating back 300 million years.
• Perhaps the most misunderstood insect is the earwig.  They don’t go into ears unless by accident.  The name earwig was originally ear-wing which refers to their wing shape which is like a human ear.  Their rear end tweezers aren’t used to pinch.
• The most unique UK insect discovered so far is the Lundy Cabbage flea beetle which lives on a 1.5 mile long strip on the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel and nowhere else in the world.
• Insects don’t flap their wings like birds do: an insect’s wings are direct attached to its exoskeleton, and by contracting their muscles, insects force their whole body to vibrate. This causes the wings to vibrate like a tuning fork.
• Bees are some of our favourite insects.  Here are some facts about bees:
  • There are about 2,000 different types of bees in the world, but only 4 can make honey.
  • Bees never sleep.
  • Bees need to visit 2 million flowers and fly 55,000 miles to make a pound a honey.
  • A queen bee has to produce at least 60,000 worker bees a year and a healthy queen can produce around 1,500 eggs a day.  Worker bees only live for six weeks so the queen has to keep producing lots of bees to keep the hive going.
  • Honeybees are excellent communicators – in the hive they can communicate the way to a patch of nectar flowers, its distance and direction, mainly by the way they waggle their bottom!
• Some insects are coloured in black and yellow warning stripes to advise predators to beware of their painful stings. But there are some very crafty insects who are coloured in this way who don’t have stings.  They just like to pretend they do!

These are just a few insect facts and we will be following up on this in the future with a blog on butterflies.  We are grateful to www.nationalinsectweek.co.uk and www.liverpoolmuseums.org for our insect facts.

Why not have a look at our range of insect products? Click here to see them. Or have a look at our Pinterest insects board here to see some amazing insect pictures.