Interesting Insects

This week (21-27 June) has been 'insect week'. So we thought that this would be a great time to do a bug hunt in our garden, and look at how important insects and other mini beasts are.

Insects are one of the most common invertebrates (animals without back bones). Their bodies have a hard outside casing and are divided into three sections. Most adult insects have got 6 legs and 2 pairs of wings.

Scientists think that there are about 1.4 million billion insects alive on Earth today!

Insects are really important. Lots of other animals eat insects so without them, some other bigger animals might not get enough food to survive. Insects pollinate a lot of flowers and this is important for helping plants to keep growing. A lot of insects eat dead waste like other dead animals or dead leaves and this helps to break these down and recycle the material in them. Some insects eat other smaller animals that can be pests. For example ladybirds eat greenfly and this helps to keep the greenfly away from our vegetables.

On our bug hunt in the garden this afternoon, we found a few different insects and some of them are on the picture above. We also found some other mini beasts that are not insects and have included these on our picture too because we liked them.

The best find was probably the moth or the ladybird. We found more bees than we expected and think that there might be a small group of bees living in holes at the edge of our wild area. The thing we found most of was lots and lots of woodlice underneath stones and plant pots. We also found quite a lot of snails, probably because it had been raining in the morning. There was also a few earwigs and quite a lot of spiders, a millipede (we think) and we're not quite sure what the yellow insect (right side in the middle on the picture) is, but think it might be a crane fly (daddy long legs).

It was really fun doing a bug hunt around the garden and good to know how much these insects are helping us.