Question: Do some people really eat bugs? Answer: Yes, some people eat bugs as part of their diet. The practice of eating insects is called entomophagy. Insects are high in nutritional value, low in fat and inexpensive. Sounds like the perfect choice for a low-cal diet. Instead of spending money on sprays to kill roaches, […]
Insects: Water Striders
What Characteristics Identify Water Striders as Insects? Insects have many different shapes, sizes, and weights. Some, like the water strider in the video, can stand and move across the water from 3 to nearly 5 feet per second. The video is in slow motion. Like all insects, water striders have three pairs of legs and […]
Insect Proboscis
Fly Straws Flies don’t chew their food like we do. Instead they drink their food through a straw-like mouth part called a proboscis. We don’t have to drink our food, but sometimes it is fun, especially if you have fun straws. Drinking liquids through a straw is easy, but if the food is very thick […]
Fly Digestion
Barfing Flies Did You Know…Flies taste with their feet? Insects have taste organs which are usually located on their mouth parts; but some insects, such as house flies can taste with their feet. When a fly walks on your pizza, nerves in the fly’s feet detect the presence of different chemicals in the food and […]
How Flowers Attract Butterflies
How to Attract Butterflies
Facts and investigations that can be used to design a science project about attracting butterflies.
Butterfly: Proboscus
OOPS! Proboscus , Proboscis is the correct spelling for this insect feeding tube. Only vertebrates (animals with backbones) have teeth as we know them. Invertebrates (animals without a backbone), such as some biting and chewing insects, including caterpillars, are have structures that function like “teeth.” These mouth parts, called mandibles, have small, sharp projections used […]
How Insects Walk
Lifters: I Wonder…How Does a Bug Walk? As a bug walks, three legs support the weight of the body while the other three legs swing forward to a new position. To walk like a grasshopper, ant, or ladybug try this:ig. With two friends, you can model how insects walk. Discover for Yourself * Adult step […]
Bugs
Bug is a term that is often used to indicate any creepy crawler, including spiders and scorpions. With this broad definition of a bug, insects might be considered a creepy crawler and thus be called a bug. But not all bugs are insects. You can distinguish insects from other bugs using the “3 by 3 […]
Crickets vs. Spiders
Bug is a term that is often used to indicate any creepy crawler. Some people call both spiders and crickets bugs. While both might be “creepy crawlers” they are very different. One difference between crickets and spiders are their number of legs. The cricket in the diagram to the right has six legs. There are […]
ButterflyWing Color
You can use a butterfly wing craft to teach camouflage. First prepare a butterfly wing for each child. This can be done by folding one-fourth of a sheet of green construction paper in half. Draw the wing pattern shown, and then cut it out. Cut a large leaf from the remaining section of the green […]