I’m a bug guy so hiking with me is an adventure in looking at the little stuff, sometimes we tend to only look ahead but not me. I’m the guy that stops to investigate a lone ant 
, or maybe something lurking behind a leaf like this Assassin Bug 
. I also tend to investigate wood rot and fungus 
or something like this 
.
So as you are out hiking don’t forget the small stuff.
skeleton
The skeleton of a spider is located on the outside of the body.
The sense of smell of an ant is just about as good as a dog’s is.
It would take about 1,200,000 mosquitoes to fully drain the average human body of blood. Not something I would like to test, just saying.
One single bite by a Bullet ant (4+) is so painful that is compared to bullet; hence its name is bullet ant. It can make your time very bad, causing trembling, burning, perspiration, throbbing and sometimes paralysis that last about 24 hours. It lives in rain-forests from Nicaragua to Amazon basin. There is a guy who lets insects bite or sting for a pain index – Justin O. Schmidt 0-4 with 4 being you might want to be dead.
A baby cockroach can run side by side with its parents.
Insect bodies have three parts, the thorax, abdomen and head.
Beetles are the most bio-diverse group of creatures known, with more than 380,000 species described to date, making up 40 percent of all insect species on the books. That’s a lot of beetles to catalog.
Only male crickets chirp.
Most insects hatch from eggs. (Don’t collect praying Mantis egg cases in winter and store them in your bedroom over the winter) they will hatch.
Termites swarm as a form of reproduction and they are showing up everywhere in the Phoenix area and beyond.
This was what it looked like under almost every rodent bait station in South Phoenix yesterday. Termite swarmers (alates) break their wings off and then start to follow the opposite sex, ready to begin a new colony. The rain triggers the reproduction mode of ants, termites and other insects. Have you seen termites swarming at you home, if so now would be a great time for a termite inspection?
Rain = the beginnings of life…
I ran across a story the other day “Crazy ants that destroy computers are immune to insecticide“. The article is well written but I just don’t like the headline. Ants can be difficult to control but we have many tools in our arsenal. Sometimes we try to control the ants we see walking around and sometimes we can use products such as Termidor to go after them, but it is vitally important to get them all and that is the biggest challenge. Ants that might forage within a house or even outside can be controlled by using baits, but they must take the bait and bring it into their home.
There are many active formulations on the market and to be immune from them all is highly unlikely. Invict Blitz Ant Granules might serve the bill. I would like to see a better title maybe like this one – Crazy ants that destroy computers and electrical equipment are very difficult to control and eliminate. On a side note I’m probably worse at titles so who am I to complain, right?
I think I wrote an article years ago about some Crazy ants at the Jacksonville Zoo, (Bugs on the , what’s it all about….) check out his article.
Andy Patrizio is a freelance technology writer based in Orange County, California. He’s written for a variety of publications, ranging from Tom’s Guide to Wired to Dr. Dobbs Journal, and has been on staff at IT publications like InternetNews, PC Week and InformationWeek..
New pirate ant species found in the Phillipines “Cardiocondyla pirata sp.” I also just found a great FaceBook page for Zookeys. It got me to thinking about how many species have been located and how many they think are still undiscovered. So I went to the source of all known things – “The Encyclopedia Smithsonian”
So keep an eye out in your backyard or while hiking, because you never know when you might walk across a new species. Read the info from the The Encyclopedia Smithsonian, it is fascinating. 
