How tiny creatures with small brains outwit us so easily.

Ants didn't take over the world by being stupid and cowardly. Case in point: Rafts of fire ants have been spotted floating around floodwaters in Houston, Texas, colonies banding together to weather super-storm Harvey.

Despite what you might've seen in 1950s monster movies, it's difficult to raise mutant ants. For years biologists have altered the genetics of organisms as varied as mice and rice. Mutant fruit flies are a laboratory staple. But ants' complex life cycle hampered efforts to grow genetically engineered ants — until now.

A new study is adding to evidence that a popular class of pesticides can harm wild bees, like bumblebees.

The number of U.S. honeybees, a critical component to agricultural production, rose in 2017 from a year earlier, and deaths of the insects attributed to a mysterious malady that’s affected hives in North America and Europe declined, according a U.S. Department of Agriculture honeybee health survey released Tuesday.

Oxford scientists are excited by the prospect of making a drug from a bug.

Verily, the life science’s arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has hatched a plan to release about 20 million lab-made, bacteria-infected mosquitos upon Fresno, California — and that’s a good thing!

A Japanese woman died last year of a tick-borne disease after being bitten by a stray cat, Japan's health ministry says, in what could be the first such mammal-to-human transmission. The unnamed woman in her 50s had been helping the apparently sick cat. Ten days later she died of Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (SFTS), which is carried by ticks.

Honey bees that consistently fail to respond to obvious social cues share something fundamental with autistic humans, researchers report in a new study. Genes most closely associated with autism spectrum disorders in humans are regulated differently in unresponsive honey bees than in their more responsive nest mates, the study found.

Bees seem to understand the idea of zero – the first invertebrate shown to do so. When the insects were encouraged to fly towards a platform carrying fewer shapes than another one, they apparently recognised “no shapes” as a smaller value than “some shapes”.

Just when we thought we'd seen it all, the internet dishes up a fat, red alien baby that looks like it's been ripped from the scorching sand dunes of Venus (we wish). In reality, it's just a Hercules beetle in its pupa form, enshrined in a chrysalis as it prepares to take on its adult form. But let's not talk it down too much - this writhing cocoon is about to become one of the largest insects on Earth.

It's a decade since US beekeepers first noticed that their bees were mysteriously dying. Now we know much more about Colony Collapse Disorder, raising hopes that we can turn bees' fortunes around.

Surveys in German nature reserves point to a dramatic decline in insect biomass. By Gretchen Vogel.

Researchers in a New York cabbage patch are planning the first release on American soil of insects genetically engineered to die before they can reproduce. It's a pesticide-free attempt to control invasive diamondback moths, a voracious consumer of cabbage, broccoli and other cruciferous...

Gas compressors in New Mexico seem to mess with some arthropods’ behavior. 

The infected beetles seek out flowers, stick their heads in and bite for their life. Then, hours after dying, their wings mysteriously spring into action

The Mountain Stone Weta, boasts perhaps the most extraordinary survival technique of all - the ability to come back from the dead. With the aid of a specialized filming chamber we are able to witness stunning footage of life slowly returning to this frozen insect.

Scientists genetically modify fungus using poison from spiders and scorpions to reduce population of the disease-carrying insects. By Stephen Chen.

A rare meat allergy used to be limited to places the lone star tick calls home. But recently it's started to spread.

The secrets of why central-American jewel scarab beetles look like they are made from pure gold, has been uncovered by physicists at the University of Exeter.

The notoriously tough insects are just as dangerous when they're wet as they are dry, according to Alabama officials.

Which marvel of nature can build a 2 metre Orb Web with a silk that ranks as the World's toughest natural fibre? - The answer is the Darwin's Bark Spider and this real life "Spider Woman", no bigger than a thumbnail has baffled scientists with her web of steel.

The world’s largest ever field trial demonstrates widely used insecticides harm both honeybees and wild bees, increasing calls for a ban. By Damian Carrington.

An adult insect wing is basically dead. So what in the world were tiny respiratory channels doing in a wing membrane of a morpho dragonfly? Rhainer Guillermo Ferreira was so jolted by a scanning electron microscope image showing what looked like skinny, branching tracheal tubes in a morpho wing that he called in another entomologist for a second opinion. Guillermo Ferreira, then at Kiel University in Germany, showed the image to a colleague who also was “shocked,” he remembers. A third entomologist was called in. Shock all around.

A simple procedure on a caterpillar gives a unique look inside the formation of color in a butterfly wing.

Scientists say the industry-funded work confirms that neonicotinoids are harmful, but manufacturers question its conclusions.

Where did these green ants come from? Watch Yellow Crazy Ants as they hunt, subdue, protect, and deal with their food on a daily basis.

Scientists have conducted field studies in Europe and Canada to look at the effect of neonicotinoid pesticides on bee populations. The same properties that make the neonicotinoids effective pesticides make them deadly to bees.

Giant bugs with a taste for meat sounds more sci-fi than fiction. But this horrifying hunger is more widespread than we think, and could be happening in your own backyard. I'm not talking about blood-thirsty spiders, or anthropomorphic cockroaches. No, I'm referring to praying mantises and their penchant for catching and consuming birds.

Debug Fresno is a study in the summer of 2017, pending approval from state and federal regulators, to test a potential mosquito control method using sterile insect technique. The study would be conducted by Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District, MosquitoMate, and Verily, and this video is intended to inform residents of the possible activities of this study. Verily, the life sciences arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, will release about 20 million lab-made, bacteria-infected sterile mosquitoes upon Fresno, California.

In the Namib desert where the sands can reach a scorching 70 degrees centigrade, very little is able to survive, but the Hotrod Ant can amazingly thrive and even forage for food. In this tense encounter an unsuspecting Hotrod Ant has strayed in AntLion territory and faces the ultimate test of survival.

After just three weeks of development, worker bees emerge from their brood cells fully formed, flying out to begin supporting their hive. In a stunning high-definition time-lapse video, the US photographer Anand Varma follows the bee's stages of development from egg to larvae to pupa to worker bee, with a sprightly score to match the insects’ rather startling journey into being.

A photo taken from above while the dragonfly was hovering.

After the age of the dinosaurs came to an end some 65 million years ago, a ‘tribe’ of ants known to scientists as the Attini decided to give up life as hunter-gatherers and become farmers instead, according to a new genetic study. It was an astonishing move that humans only managed to accomplish some 10,000 years ago. The ants, native to South America, began farming fungus that grew on decomposing wood, setting off an evolutionary revolution.

Each year when summer comes along, we all look forward to different things. Some of us head to the beach, others to the mountains for camping. Some look forward to the epicurean delights like watermelon and ice cones. But for a select group of photographers in Japan, Summer signals the arrival of fireflies.