Did you know that less than two per cent of the insects on our planet are harmful?
This means that most insects are, in fact, beneficial. But how many insects are we talking about here?
Well, the scientists in the entomology department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln say they have identified more than one million different species of insects to date.
They are also identifying about seven thousand new species each year with assistance from their Science Literacy and Outreach program. Because of these numbers, the entomologists are now estimating there could be as many as ten million insect species residing on our planet still waiting to be discovered and identified.
If their estimation of these numbers is true, then it seems there are a lot of potentially beneficial insects that are keeping the pest insects under control.
But are all pest insects really pests? Take fly species for instance. An annoying pest to humans and Sadie snaps at any that lands on her. However, we would not have chocolate if it were not for two midge families, Ceratopogonidae and Cecidomyiidae. No larger than a pinhead, they are the sole pollinators of the cacao flowers and therefore, are uniquely responsible for upholding the $100 billion chocolate industry globally.
Wasps - everyone鈥檚 abhorred summertime pest. And yet, wasp venom has proven to be very effective in killing certain cancer cells - it makes them beneficial, I think, as are the European paper wasps. They have ferocious appetites for sawfly larvae and they often work right beside me on my infested azaleas every spring. But a word of warning -do watch out for them in early spring when they are slow-moving and dopey. One climbed inside my pant leg and stung me while I was minding my own business, sowing veggie seeds in flats in the greenhouse.
Wondering why I am focusing on insects? First off, they have fascinated me since I was old enough to wander the back 40 by myself. I've spent countless hours watching ants, tracking slugs, poking sow bugs and watching bees.
Lately, I have been rekindling that childhood insect passion as I work at removing a patch of omphalodes cappadocica, (navelwort), roughly 240 sq ft (22.3 sq m) in size. Truthfully, this plant is a lovely groundcover with its abundant display of forget-me-not lookalike flowers in spring and its total resistance to insect, rabbit and deer damage. But I have let the patch get too big and I need to reclaim some prime shade garden real estate. Plants that were once shaded by the maple we removed a couple of months ago are now suffering from sunburn.
So, in wrestling with the omphalodes, it would seem I am uncovering a baby snail nursery. There are dozens and dozens of them, some of them so minuscule as to be almost unrecognizable as snails except they do have shells. I have never thought about baby snails before; it is the bigger ones you typically see and I have found four under the omphalodes, so far. But it would seem the baby snails are born with a shell and it grows as the snail grows, which kind of makes sense.
The second reason for the insect topic is due to a book synopsis I came across: A Devastating Examination of How Collapsing Insect Populations Worldwide Threaten Everything from Wild Birds to the Food on our Plate, written by Oliver Milman, an environment correspondent for Guardian US, the book is called The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World.
Fact: It takes roughly 200,000 insects to raise just one swallow chick to adulthood. How many other bird species rely on insects to feed their young?
