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Insects are the most numerous class of animals on our planet.

Three quarters of all animal species known to science belong to it! Butterflies and dragonflies, beetles and flies, bees and grasshoppers - all these are insects.

Despite the fact that many of them are completely different from each other, all insects, without exception, have three identical characteristics, which distinguish them from all other living organisms.

First, all insects have six legs (and therefore centipedes are not insects!). Secondly, there are so-called notches on the body of insects: the body of any of them seems to be divided into separate segments. And the word “insects” itself means “notched,” that is, with notches. The third distinctive feature is that the insect’s body can easily be distinguished into three parts: head, chest and abdomen. All insects have this division, although sometimes you have to look really hard to spot it.
Insects live in forests and water bodies, in the air and deep underground, in deserts and in permafrost areas. True, many of them are so small that you can’t even see them without a microscope! And others like to hide in cracks and cracks, under stones and tree bark. This is why it seems to us that there are fewer insects than there actually are.

How many insects are there in the world?
Not a single scientist will undertake to answer this question, because today about a million different species of insects are known, but even more are unknown. And this only applies to species! And if we talk about the number of insects of all types, then amazing things will become clear: the total mass of all flying, swimming, crawling six-legged creatures on Earth is 30-40 times greater than the weight of all the people on our planet.
In fact, the number of insects changes all the time, because their life spans are quite short (for example, mayfly butterflies live only one day). However, most insects are unusually prolific. For example, the offspring of a common housefly can reach 5 trillion insects in one summer. If you lined them up in one line, then this line would stretch from the Earth to the Moon! According to scientists, on one hectare (area 100 x 100 m) you can find more insects than people on the entire planet.
However, if the number of insects is so huge, why don’t they cover the Earth in a continuous layer? The fact is that insects serve as food for birds, animals and even other insects. This is one of the factors limiting the uncontrolled reproduction of six-legged animals.

Why are there so many insects?
It has long been known that in nature there is nothing superfluous. This incredible number of insects on our planet is explained by the fact that they are very important for maintaining life on Earth, because they all actively work together to maintain the health of our planet.

For example, without plants there would be no life on Earth, because they serve as food for humans and many animals, and also produce oxygen necessary for the respiration of all living organisms. However, most plants will simply disappear if they do not leave seeds, and the seeds in them develop only after pollination. And no one doubts that insects are the best pollinators of plants after mammals. The harvest in our gardens, orchards, and fields also depends on pollinating insects.

Insects are also irreplaceable for the reason that they are practically the only orderlies on our planet (besides jackals, hyenas and some vulture birds): the larvae hatching from eggs quickly destroy dead plants and the corpses of dead animals. In addition, insects play a huge role in the formation of soil; they also form an important link in food chain on Earth, being food for each other, as well as for toads, fish, lizards, birds, bears and many others.

Do you know how many species of insects live on our planet? From 2 to 4 million different species! Scientists have described about 625,000 species of insects, and there is little hope that all existing insect species will ever be described. No class of animals can even approach the number of species of insects.

If you try to estimate the absolute number of insects living on earth, the figure will be so huge that the human mind cannot even imagine it! The only way scientists can estimate the approximate number of insects living in the ground is to count their number in 1 square meter. m of wet soil. This number ranges from 500 to 2000.

Thus, one acre of good soil should support about 4 million insects. Most of these insects are indistinguishable to the human eye. Many of them are simply microscopic in size. And only a few thousand species of insects bother people enough for them to try to control them. If you think about it, you realize that a person is literally surrounded by insects, but has no idea how many of them there are around!

The vast majority of insects have two things in common: their body is divided into three parts and they usually have six legs, although there are exceptions to this rule.

What are aphids?

Aphids (or, in other words, plant lice) are green and brownish insects no more than 6 mm in length. Aphids reproduce so quickly that if they were not destroyed by natural enemies, they would have eaten almost all the plants on Earth! Aphids can be found on the leaves, stems, and roots of all kinds of plants. These insects often cause significant harm fruit trees, flowers, vegetables and grain crops. They have an unusually strong mouth or proboscis that protrudes from a tiny head. With this proboscis, the aphid pierces the surface of the leaf and sucks out its juices, after which the plant withers and, most likely, dies.

The most curious thing about the life of aphids is that the aphid's body secretes a sweet liquid called "honeydew", and ants love to drink this liquid. The ants capture the aphids and take care of them like a farmer takes care of his cows. Having dragged aphids into their nest, the ants supply them with a sufficient amount of greenery and carefully protect them. When an ant wants to milk its “cow,” it strokes the aphid’s abdomen with its antennae, and tiny drops of honeydew are released on the edge of the abdomen. The ant drinks these drops. A person has no particular reason to protect aphids, so he often destroys them by spraying them with chemicals.

What does a butterfly eat?

As you know, the life of a butterfly goes through several cycles. First an egg, then a caterpillar, then a pupa (which sleeps all winter), and finally a butterfly emerges from the pupa. There is one period in the life of a butterfly when it eats especially a lot. This is the time when she remains a caterpillar. For some species of butterflies, the caterpillar stage is the only period of life when they eat anything at all. The caterpillar eats and grows in size until the skin bursts, which gives way to a new one, and so on many times in a row, and after a few weeks the caterpillar becomes many times larger than at first.

But in general, butterflies are quite adapted to eating: they have a head, chest, and abdomen. Those butterflies that eat have a proboscis instead of a mouth, which is coiled up between meals, like a clock spring. This proboscis can penetrate deep into the core of a flower in order to suck out its nectar.

In moths, this proboscis can reach a length of 15–20 cm, so that it is able to penetrate large tubular flowers. Some of them have incisor-like teeth at the end of their proboscis, which they can use to gnaw through the skins of fruits and drink their juice!

What do flies eat?

Due to its tiny size (1000 adult flies weigh 25–30 g), the average housefly does not need much food and will therefore find enough food for itself anywhere. Houseflies don't eat solid food because they don't have anything to chew it with. The fly's mouth is only suitable for sucking up liquid food. The role of the “tongue” is played by the proboscis, which resembles the trunk of an elephant. It is also divided into two at the end and these channels act as tubes through which liquid food is absorbed.

The common belief that houseflies bite before a thunderstorm is incorrect. It's just that in these cases, houseflies are confused with other types of flies, such as desert flies or dung flies. These flies are blood-sucking flies, and they bite people. But, if houseflies don’t bite, why then are they considered so dangerous to humans? The fact is that the legs with pads and the body of flies are covered with protruding hairs, and their tongue is coated with sticky mucus. This means that dust and dirt are constantly sticking to the fly. And since houseflies look for food everywhere, including garbage and sewage, dirt and dust that stick to the fly may contain bacteria that cause various diseases, which transfer to our food when a fly lands on it, and along with the food enter the human body.

How are flies born?

Everyone knows that flies are carriers of infection. The fly is born and spends most of your life near waste and other places favorable for the development of bacteria. In fact, this damp, decaying matter is the most optimal place for breeding flies. Here the female lays white eggs (about 1.2 mm in size), from which thin, worm-like, legless larvae emerge. This is the "feeding" stage of the fly's life. Five or six days later, the larva's skin thickens and turns brownish and the life of the fly enters a resting stage: the larva becomes a pupa.

After another 5–6 days, an adult fly emerges from the pupa shell. The size of this fly does not change in the future: large flies do not grow from small ones. Another 10 days later, the fly mates, and a little later the female lays 100 to 150 eggs! Not all types of flies reproduce like houseflies.

Some incubate eggs within themselves and give birth to live larvae, and some species lay eggs that are already in the pupal stage. Due to the fact that flies spread diseases, people constantly fight against them. The best time to kill flies is in winter or early spring. During this cold season, flies hide in dark, warm corners and are very hungry all the time, so they are easy to catch and kill.