Insect Facts

How's this for a quick fact? There are many more kinds of insects on earth than there are of any other kind of living creature! Insects have the greatest number of individuals living of at any one time. It is estimated that there are approximately 10 quintillion or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual insects alive.

If you're a diehard insect fan and you have this passion to discover all kinds of insects, you might get frustrated that you could spend your whole life looking at different kinds of insects and you'll never be able to see them all.

For insect enthusiasts, here is a list of insect facts!

1. For every human in the world there are one million ants.
2. The longest migration for an insect goes to the Desert who travels about 2800 miles yearly.
3. There are nearly 5,000 different kinds of ladybugs worldwide and 400 which live in North America.
4. The color a head louse will be as an adult can depend on the color of the person's hair in which it lives.
5. Bed bugs prefer to hide in cracks and crevices during the daytime and come out to feed on the host's blood at night, usually while the host is sleeping.
6. Termites have the biggest nests. The largest termite mound, found in Australia was 6.1 meters across at the base.
7. German cockroaches can survive for up to one month without food and two weeks without water
8. A cockroach can live for nine days without its head
9. Dragonflies have as many as 30,000 lenses in each eye.
10. Adult dragonflies eat mostly other flying insects, particularly midges and mosquitoes. They will also take a piece of butterflies, moths and smaller dragonflies.
11. Only female mosquitoes bite humans. Male mosquitoes live on natural liquids from plants and other resources.
12. The average life span of a mosquito is two weeks.
13. Flies can "taste" with their feet.
14. There is only one insect that can turn its head -- the praying mantis.
15. Many insects can carry 50 times their own body weight.
16. The common garden worm has five pairs of hearts.
17. Mayflies live for as little as one hour.
18. Each cocoon of a silkworm can produce a single thread of silk that is about 1,500 feet long. More than 25,000 cocoons are needed just to make a pound of silk
19. Owlet Moths, or Noctuids, are part of a gigantic family of moths with some specimens on record with an amazing 18 inch wing span.
20. The most dangerous creature to the human population is the common housefly. Houseflies can transmit intestinal worms, or their eggs, and are potential vectors of diseases such as dysentery, gastroenteritis, typhoid, cholera and tuberculosis.