Nearly 700 million people suffer from mosquito-borne diseases—such as malaria, West Nile, Zika and dengue fever—each year, resulting in more than 1 million deaths. Increasingly, many species of mosquitoes have become resistant to the popular pyrethroid-based insecticides. Today, researchers report a new class of mosquito repellents based on naturally occurring compounds that are effective in repelling mosquitoes with potentially fewer environmental side effects than existing repellents.

The discovery is among the strongest evidence in the fossil record that the insects pollinated prehistoric cycads, a plant that preceded flowering plants.

For the first time in 50 years, a new tick species has arrived in the United States — one that in its Asian home range carries fearsome diseases. The Asian long-horned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, is spreading rapidly along the Eastern Seaboard. It has been found in seven states and in the heavily populated suburbs of New York City.

Mating may last anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours

By releasing specially bred mosquitoes that can't transmit viruses, scientists have been able to virtually eradicate dengue fever from the city of Townsville, Queensland, in north-eastern Australia – and they say the same methods could be scaled up

Is an insect Armageddon afoot?

Researchers say bees understand the concept of nothing, or zero. But do we understand what that means?

US farmers are planting more and more acres with seeds coated with neonicotinoid pesticides. An ecologist explains why this approach is overkill and may be doing more harm than good.

Two billion people around the world already eat bugs, a number that's rising as more people count the environmental costs of meat.

But the infection is surging elsewhere, particularly in the Americas.

A philosophical and neurobiological look into the apian mind.

While killing insects would seem to be the best way of controlling the diseases they spread, some scientists are releasing more of the biting bug, re-engineered to stall epidemics.

Almost a quarter of British honey samples remain contaminated after a partial ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, new research has revealed. The contamination rate has fallen – it was more than half before the ban – but the study shows that the potent insecticides remain prevalent in the farmed environment and still pose a serious risk to bees and other vital pollinators.

Margaret Cox searches for butterflies, but there's no joy if she finds them. They are the by-product of what she terms a "geophysical anomaly". We know it by its common name: a mass grave.

Biologists from the University of Washington have discovered that the act of swatting at mosquitoes may actually deter them from biting you, and the degree

In order to fight Zika and other similar viruses, researchers are going to release thousands of sterilised mosquitoes in south Miami, Florida this week. Researchers infected the male of the species with a bacteria in a lab and when they mate with females, the resulting eggs will die before hatching. The Miami-Dade County Mosquito Reduction Test Program is a collaboration from the University of Kentucky and Kentucky-based company MosquitoMate.

The evolution of wings not only allowed ancient insects to become the first creatures on Earth to take to the skies, but also propelled their rise to become one of nature’s great success stories, according to a new study.

Truly vibrant red was elusive for many years: until a mysterious dye was discovered in Mexico. Devon Van Houten Maldonado reveals how a crushed bug became a sign of wealth and status.

Miniature glasses have revealed a new form of 3D vision in praying mantises that could lead to simpler visual processing for robots. Publishing their latest research in Current Biology, the Newcastle University team have discovered that mantis 3D vision works differently from all previously known forms of biological 3D vision. 3D or stereo vision helps us work out the distances to the things we see. Each of our eyes sees a slightly different view of the world. Our brains merge these two views to create a single image, while using the differences between the two views to work out how far away things are.

Scientists fitted praying mantises with tiny 3D glasses to understanding how they see the world, and discovered the insects have a “completely new form” of vision unlike that of any other known creature. Researchers used beeswax to glue the miniature eyewear to the faces of mantises and study how their vision compares to human sight.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have used a new technique to produce detailed images of dragonfly wings, showing more than 10 billion tiny 'fingers' (nanostructures) lining the wing surface that make bacteria tear themselves apart.

Termite-hunting ants in sub-Saharan Africa treat each other’s wounds by licking them, according to new research. It might sound icky — but the treatment actually saves lives. The ant, called Megaponera analis, specializes in raiding termite nests. These hunts, however, are dangerous: The ants can lose legs or antennas, and sometimes they die. A study last year showed that the ants rescue their injured friends in the battlefield...

Very quietly, and without any formal announcement, the Common Names Committee of the Entomological Society of America has decided to list termites in the same category as cockroaches. It seem weird to lump the two together, but it’s a move that scientists have been considering for nearly a century.

The exoskeleton of the tortoise beetle changes color and reflective properties due to a chirped multilayer reflector filled with grooves that fill and empty of fluid to cover and reveal, respectively, the bottommost layer.

Author summary The causative agent of malaria, Plasmodium, has to complete a complex infection cycle in the Anopheles gambiae mosquito vector in order to reach the salivary gland from where it can be transmitted to a human host. The parasite’s development in the mosquito relies on numerous host factors (agonists), and their inhibition or inactivation can thereby result in suppression of infection and consequently malaria transmission.

These uniquely versatile bugs are decimating crops and infiltrating houses all across the country. Will we ever be able to get rid of them?

Joanne Seiff, a resident of Manitoba, contracted Lyme disease a couple of years ago but didn’t remember pulling off the tick that bit her; nor did she have the telltale bullseye rash of a tick bite. Her husband Jeff Marcus, who grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, about an hour and a half from the eponymous town of Lyme, Connecticut, recognized her symptoms immediately because Lyme disease was common there.

The impacts of climate change ripple through ecosystems in unexpected ways.

A pesky mosquito sips some of your blood. Hours later, the blood-sucker drops dead, poisoned by the very blood it just slurped down. That may sound too good to be true, but it's a tantalizing possibility, according to research published this week in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The study points to a potential new tool to fight malaria: the medication ivermectin. Studies conducted in the 2000s, including one in 2010, show that malaria-carrying mosquitoes die after feeding on individuals who have ingested the drug.

Don’t let the cockroach that feeds on your forgotten leftovers stop you from appreciating these native beauties.

Our best bet to avoid 'peak pharma' may be beneath our feet, in the diminutive world of insects.

High in the treetops of Borneo, there’s an ant with a deadly secret. It can explode. On the outside, it’s just an inconspicuous, brownish-red ant. It lacks large mandibles, cannot sting, and generally seems like easy pickings for any predator with a rumbly in the tumbly. But when these ants feel threatened, they raise up their rumps as a warning, says Alice Laciny, an entomologist with Natural History Museum Vienna in Austria who described the first new species of exploding ant since 1935 in the journal Zookeys.

Ants have an incredible instinct to help their comrades.

High in the treetops of Borneo, there’s an ant with a deadly secret. It can explode. On the outside, it’s just an inconspicuous, brownish-red ant. It lacks large mandibles, cannot sting, and generally seems like easy pickings for any predator with a rumbly in the tumbly. But when these ants feel threatened, they raise up their rumps as a warning, says Alice Laciny, an entomologist with Natural History Museum Vienna in Austria who described the first new species of exploding ant since 1935 in the journal Zookeys.

Li Yanrong’s farm in Zhangqiu district in Jinan, Henan province, houses 300 million American cockroaches that together munch through about 15 tonnes of food waste a day, or about a quarter of the district’s kitchen scraps. “These cockroaches are not afraid of anything soft, hard, sour, sweet, bitter, or spicy,” Li was quoted as saying.