Male moths can sense the pheromones of female moths over great distances. Other species communicate with sounds: crickets stridulate, or rub their wings together, to attract a mate and repel other males. Fireflies and glowworms communicate with light.

Yellow fever virus is taken up by a female mosquito when it ingests the blood of an infected human or another primate. When the mosquito next sucks blood, it injects its saliva into the wound, and the virus reaches the bloodstream of the bitten person.

The Dracula ant can snap its mandibles at up to 90 metres a second (more than 200 miles per hour) and go from 0 to 200 mph in 0.000015 seconds, striking 5,000 times faster than the blink of an eye--the fastest animal movement on record.

The largest wasp nest ever recorded was found on a farm at Waimaukau, New Zealand, in April 1963. It was so heavy that it had fallen from the tree in which it had been hanging and split into two. When whole, it measured 12 ft 2 in (3.7 m) long, and was 5.25 ft (1.75 m) in diameter and approximately 18 ft (5.5 m) in circumference. It had probably been constructed by German wasps (Vespula germanica).

During the Second World War, the Japanese worked on entomological warfare techniques under Shirō Ishii. Japanese Yagi bombs developed at Pingfan consisted of two compartments, one with houseflies and another with a bacterial slurry that coated the houseflies prior to release. Vibrio cholerae, which causes cholera, was the bacterium of choice, and was used in Baoshan, China in 1942 to produce an epidemic that ultimately claimed 200,000 victims.

In North America, the seven-spotted ladybug or ladybird beetle, with its shiny, red-and-black body, is most common. But ladybugs come in many different colors and patterns. In fact, there are more than 5,000 different species of ladybugs in the world.

In their Pulitzer-prize winning book The Ants, researchers Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson estimate that there are upwards of 10,000,000,000,000,000 individual ants alive on Earth at any given time--that's 10 quadrillion.

All insects have six legs (three pairs of jointed legs) and usually four wings (two pairs).

Dragonflies are some of the most efficient hunters in the animal kingdom, catching up to 95% of the prey they pursue. By comparison, a lion's success rate is a mere 20%.

Lyme disease is transmitted to humans by the bites of infected ticks of the genus Ixodes. In the United States, ticks of concern are usually of the Ixodes scapularis type, and must be attached for at least 36 hours before the bacteria can spread. In Europe ticks of the Ixodes ricinus type may spread the bacteria more quickly.