Dear Lucy,
There are a lot of different grasshoppers living on our planet. In fact, scientists have discovered more than 11,000 species. Exactly how these grasshoppers spend their winter depends on what kind of winter they experience.
Read More ...Dear Anita,
Ants are pretty good little weightlifters. My friend Rich Zack, a scientist at Washington State University who studies insects, knows a lot about ants. One kind of ant that he has studied can carry up to 20 times its own weight.
Read More ...Dear Gianni,
Our planet is home to more than seven million amazing animal species. While we have our differences, we also have something in common: We are all made up of a bunch of cells.
Read More ...Dear Tanya,
You know it’s springtime when animals start coming out of hibernation. That includes ladybugs that crawl out from their cozy winter hiding places.
Read More ...Dear Johnny,
Spiders can do some amazing things with their sticky, stretchy, and super-strong silk. Us cats are pretty curious about these little silk-spinning machines, too.
Read More ...Dear Laurenz,
When I saw your question, I set out to explore with my bug net and a magnifying glass. I was searching all around for tiny insects when I ran into my friend Laura Lavine, a Washington State University scientist who studies bugs.
She said there are nearly a million different kinds of insects on Earth. The smallest of all the known ones are called fairyflies.
Read More ...Dear Roarna,
When cold winters come around, thousands of monarch butterflies begin a long journey in search of warmer weather. Some will fly more than 2,200 miles to find it.
Read More ...Dear Aditya,
When bees make hexagons in their hives, the six-sided shapes fit together perfectly. In fact, we’ve actually never seen bees make any other shape. That’s what I found out when I visited my friend Sue Cobey, a bee researcher at Washington State University.
Cobey showed me some honeycombs where the female bees live and work. Hexagons are useful shapes. They can hold the queen bee’s eggs and store the pollen and honey the worker bees bring to the hive.
When you think about it, making circles wouldn’t work too well. It would leave gaps in the honeycomb. The worker bees could use triangles or squares for storage. Those wouldn’t leave gaps. But the hexagon is the strongest, most useful shape.
Read More ...Dear Kathryn,
Most spiders have quite a few eyes, but they usually can’t see very well. Then again, seeing isn’t everything.
Read More ...Dear Eston,
Springtime sets the stage for one of the greatest transformations in the natural world.
“It’s the construction of a butterfly or moth from caterpillar soup,” said my friend David James, an entomologist at Washington State University. James studies the science behind metamorphosis, or how a creature transforms.
Read More ...