Honeybee

Honeybees have a intense color pattern to caution potential predators (or honey thieves!) that they have a weapon to protect themselves. Their weapon is a customized ovipositor (egg-laying tube). This is mutual with a venom gland to make a stinger (formally known as an aculeus) situated at the end of the abdomen. Because the stinger is adapted from a structure found only in females, male bees cannot sting. When the hive is endangered, honeybees will group out and assault with their stingers to drive the enemy away.

Three classes of honeybees

* Workers: immature females with stings, seen only in early summer.
* Queens: superior in size than workers.
* Drones or males: larger than the workers but with no sting.

Worker bees do all the dissimilar tasks wanted to maintain and operate the hive. They make up the huge majority of the hive's occupants and they are all sterile females. When young, they are called house bees and work in the hive doing comb construction, brood rearing, treatment the queen and drones, cleaning, temperature regulation and defensive the hive.

There is only one queen in a hive and her major purpose in life is to create more bees. She can lay over 1,500 eggs for each day and will live two to eight years. She is larger (up to 20mm) and has a longer abdomen than the workers or drones. She has chewing mouthparts. Her stinger is bent with no barbs on it and she can use it lots of times.

Drones, as they are males, contain no stinger. They live concerning eight weeks. Only a few hundred - at most - are ever there in the hive. Their sole function is to buddy with a new queen, if one is produced in a given year. A drone's eyes are obviously bigger than those of the additional castes.

7-Spot Ladybird

About 3500 ladybird species have been described of which 46 can be establish in the Uk, and of these only 26 will be willingly recognized as Ladybirds. Ladybird beetles or Ladybugs in the USA, are almost certainly the most well known of all insects. They are a beneficial zoophagous garden species as both adults and larvae feed on a lot of different soft-bodied insects - aphids, spider mites, greenflies, whiteflies, mealybugs and other scale insects - with aphids life form their main food source. They lay eggs in small clusters of 10-50, stuck to the base of leaves where aphids are usually found, hatching in about 7 days. The larvae with their spiky segmented body, 6 legs, no wings, fierce form and a voracious appetite for greenfly, are infrequently called "insect alligators". They feed on the near aphids, having 3 stages (4 instars) previous to pupating.

Adults hibernate over winter, in bark crevices, houses and rocks, now and then in large groups. Ladybirds are small dome wrought between 5-12mm long (0.2-0.5), and depending on species, they are mostly a sleek red colour with black spots, six legs and two short antennae. There are other colour variations - black with red spots, yellow, orange & black forms. Larvae are predated by Lacewings and adults by small birds, but the adult Ladybird is capable of exuding a foul tasting liquid from it's leg joints, so they are not usually eaten. Mostly helpful to the environment there are a number of Ladybird species that feed on plants quite than insects, two notable ones being the Squash Beetle and the Mexican bean beetle. Most Ladybirds have one cohort per year but some will have 2 generations Eg. the 14 Spot Ladybird.

Spring flooding killed many crop pest insects

Spring flooding that injured Indiana cropland delivered an unanticipated bonus to farmers and homeowners -- less crop-eating insects.

Soaked soil conditions in May and early June killed many insects by destroying their eggs or larva, said John Obermeyer, a field crops entomologist with the Purdue University Extension.

"Right now we're considering extremely low numbers of corn rootworm beetles, specially the Western corn rootworm beetle, as well as the Japanese beetle," he thought

Obermeyer said the floods hit about the time that rootworm eggs emerge into larva. Those grub-like creatures had a hard time getting from side to side the saturated soils and finding corn roots to eat.