Picture of Kerria lacca from the book, Indian Insect Life: a Manual of the Insects of the Plains by Harold Maxwell-Lefroy

As You Lakh It

How did an oleoresin produced by insects in Asia become a standard part of European furniture manufacture and conservation?
A false colored scanning electron micrograph of a flour beetle

Bugging Out

The complicated, ever-changing, millennia-long relationship between insects and humans.
From The Tertiary insects of North America, 1890

Historical Bugs: Archaeoentomology

The remains of ancient insects reveal new information about Paleo-Eskimo life and the history of the Norse in Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands.
Limnoria quadripunctata, male and female, ventral view.

How “Termites of the Sea” Have Shaped Maritime Technology

These small marine pests have been eating our ships for millennia, forcing us to keep building better boats throughout history.
An ant in the snow

How Do Insects Survive Winter?

Some species have adapted to get themselves close to freezing without dying.
A Rosy-breasted Longclaw specimen

How Ornithologists Figured Out How to Preserve Birds

A very nineteenth-century-science problem: lots of decaying avian specimens.
Coloured SEM of eye of sand fly (Ceratopogonidae)

Dude, There Are Sand Flies That Consume Cannabis

Could these blood-sucking pests actually have the munchies?
From THEM!, 1954

Fear of an Insect Planet

"Big bug movies" of the 1950s have been interpreted as projections of nuclear anxieties. But what if they were about...actual fear of bugs?
Eric LoPresti

Some Plants Use Stickiness to Fend off Hungry Insects

For some sand-dwelling plants, stickiness is a defense tactic that keeps predators at bay.
A swarm of locusts by Emil Schmidt

How the Soviet Union Turned a Plague into Propaganda

The fight against locust swarms allowed the Soviet Union to consolidate power over neighboring regions.