The Yellow Meadow Ant (Lasius flavus) is a small insect. It is also known as the Yellow Hill Ant.
The Yellow Meadow Ant varies from yellow to light-brown. It has a head, abdomen, and thorax with six legs.
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Category Insects, Arachnids, and Bugs
Scarlet Skimmer Dragonfly
The Scarlet Skimmer Dragonfly (Crocothemis servilia) is an insect in the Libellulidae family of dragonflies. It is also known as the Ruddy Marsh Skimmer.
The Scarlet Skimmer Dragonfly has a long red abdomen and transparent wings. Its eyes are blood-red. The female has an olive-brown body. It has a small dark patch at the base of its hindwings (back wings).
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Pink Wing Stick Insect
The Pink Wing Stick Insect (Sipyloidea sipylus) is a phasmid insect in the Sipyloidea family of stick insects. It is also known as the Madagascan Stick Insect. It is related to the Praying Mantis.
The Pink Wing Stick Insect is long, thin and stick-like. It has a light-brown body that is camouflaged to look like dry straw, or dry grass. Both the male and the female have wings, but the wings of the female are too small for flying.
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Black-and-Red-Bug
The Black-and-Red-Bug (Lygaeus equestris) is an insect in the Lygaeidae family of ground bugs.
The Black-and-Red Bug has a red-black pattern on its exoskeleton. Its hemelytra (front wings) are black and red with an oval-shaped white dot. It is also red and black on its scutellum (head shield). The scutellum has tiny hairs. It has fully-developed wings and long, strong legs. It antennae are long.It has a sucking mouthpart.
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What is the difference between the European Wasp and the European Paper Wasp?
What is the difference between the European Wasp (Vespula vulgaris) and the European Paper Wasp (Polistes dominula)?
The European Wasp, also called the Common Wasp, and the European Paper Wasp are both vespid insects.
The European Wasp and the European Paper Wasp are both social wasps living in colonies with a queen wasp and worker wasps.
The European Wasp and the European Paper Wasp both have black and yellow bodies with yellowish-orange legs.
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European Paper Wasp
The European Paper Wasp (Polistes dominula) is a hymenopteran insect, a winged insect related to bees, wasps, and hornets. It is a vespid and a polist wasp in the Polistini tribe. It is a social wasp. It is also known as the Common Poet.
The European Paper Wasp has a slender yellow and black body and long yellowish-orange legs. It drags its legs behind it when it is flying, because its legs are long. Its narrow wings are orange with dark tips. It has large eyes. Its antennae are yellowish-orange with club-shaped tips.
It has a venomous stinger at the end of its abdomen. It can sting multiple times because the stinger stays in the body (the stinger of bees comes out of the body when the bee stings an animal, so it can only sting once).
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Long-Bodied Daddy Long-Legs Spider
The Long-Bodied Daddy Long-Legs Spider (Pholcus phalangiodes) is an arachnid in the Pholcidae family. It is also known as the Cellar Spider.
The Long-Bodied Daddy Long-Legs Spider has a light-brown or dark-brown carapace (shell) and a brown, beige or grey abdomen, but mostly it looks pale and translucent (clear). It has scissor-like jaws, called chelicerae, that move from side to side. It has eight small eyes grouped closely together. It has very long, thin legs that are banded at the joints.
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Black House Spider
The Black House Spider (Badumna insignis) is a common arachnid. It is also known as the Common Black Spider.
The Black House Spider has a dark-brown or black carapace (shell) and a greyish abdomen. It is covered with fine, velvety hair. It has two front pedipalps near its mouth.
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Purple Ground Beetle
The Purple Ground Beetle (Chlaenius purpuricollis) is an insect in the Carabidae family of ground beetles. It is related to the Black Ground Beetle.
The Purple Ground Beetle has a shiny black body with a purple metallic sheen. It has a small rounded head, a small thorax (chest), and an oval, slightly domed abdomen (body). It has wing covers, called eytra. One wing cover is called an elytron. Its antennae are long, black, and ridged. It has a groove on its foreleg with a comb of hairs used for cleaning its antennae.
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Spider Wasp
The Spider Wasp (Auplopus carbonarius) is an insect in the Pompilidae family of wasps. It is a pompilid.
The Spider Wasp has a metallic black body with iridescent, greyish-black, translucent (clear) wings. It has a large head, a rounded thorax (chest), a thin waist, and a long abdomen. Its legs are black and its antennae are black.
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Fallacy: All Bees Live in Hives
A fallacy is something that is not true.
All bees live in hives is a fallacy.
Do all bees live in hives? No, not all bees live in hives. There are social bees and solitary bees.
A colony of bees—many thousands of bees—are social bees that live together in a hive. The Bumblebee and the Honeybee (or Honey Bee) are social bees, living in colonies, and living in hives.
However, solitary bees do not live in hives.
Most bee species are, in fact, solitary bees.
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Juvenile Firebug
The Firebug (Pyrrhocoris apterus) is a common insect in the Pyrrhocoridae family.
It is hemimetabolous, which means that it does not undergo full metamorphosis. Instead, the life cycle includes only nymphs (juveniles) and adults.
The juvenile Firebug does not look like its parents. It has the same shape and the same colour as its parents, but it does not yet have the same black markings. Instead, the juvenile has one black strip on the back of its head (not two), an M-shaped black mark at the top of its shell (not a triangle), and three small black dots in the middle of its shell.
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Eyed Longhorn Beetle
The Eyed Longhorn Beetle (Oberea oculata) is an insect in the Cerambycidae family of longhorn beetles. It is also known as the Eyed Longicorn.
The Eyed Longhorn Beetle has an elongated, brown body with brown wing cases called elytra. It has an orange thorax and underbelly. It has two black dots on its pronotum (the section behind its head). It has a shiny black head with long, black antennae.
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European Dark Bee
The European Dark Bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) is an insect and a sub-species of the Western Honeybee, also called the European Honeybee (Apis mellifera). It is also known as the German Black Bee or the German Dark Bee.
The European Dark Bee has a head, thorax (chest), and abdomen (stomach) with a stinger. It has a brown-black abdomen with a few lighter spots on its abdomen. Its wings are transparent. It has six legs, and large eyes.
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American House Spider
The American House Spider (Parasteatoda tepidariorum) is an arachnid in the Theridiidae family of spiders. It is also known as the Cobweb Spider or the Tangle-Web Spider.
The American House Spider is brown with mottled markings. It has a large, bulbous, round abdomen with eight long legs. The two front legs are longer than the oher legs. Its legs are black with light brown bands.
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What are the differences between the Asian Hornet and the European Hornet?
What are the differences between the Asian Hornet (Vespa velutina) and the European Hornet (Vespa crabro)?
The Asian Hornet and the European Hornet are both insects in the family of eusocial wasps. They both live in colonies of several thousand individuals.
The Asian Hornet has a smooth, black and yellow-orange body with yellow legs and black wings, whereas the European Hornet has a smooth, black and yellow body with distinctive yellow legs and reddish-orange wings.
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Asian Hornet
The Asian Hornet (Vespa velutina) is an insect in the family of eusocial wasps. It is a vespine. It is also known as the Yellow-Legged Hornet.
The Asian Hornet has a smooth black and yellow-orange body with black wings and yellow legs, called tarsi. Its thorax (chest) is brown or black. Its abdomen (stomach) is brown. Each abdominal segment has a narrow yellow border, except for the fourth segment, which is orange. Its head is black with a yellow-orange face and black antennae. The female worker hornet has a smooth barbless stinger that can repeatedly sting an animal.
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Mediterranean Wood-Boring Bee
The Mediterranean Wood-Boring Bee (Lithurgus chrysurus) is an insect in the Megachilidae family of wood-boring bees.
The Mediterranean Wood-Boring Bee has a slightly flattened, elongated body. It is black with pale-yellow or white bands. It has six legs, two pairs of wings, and three body parts: (1) head, (2) thorax, and (3) abdomen. Its wings are translucent (see-through). Its body has bristly hairs on its sides.
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Bird Dropping Spider
The Bird Dropping Spider (Celaenia excavata) is an arachnid in the Araneidae family. The toxicity of the Bird Dropping Spider is unknown. It is also known as Death’s Head Spider, Orchard Spider, and Bird-Dung Spider.
The Bird Dropping Spider looks like bird droppings – bird poop – to avoid predators, such as birds. It has a broad, triangular, black-brown body with a pair of bumps near its rear end. Its legs are usually folded against its body.
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Brown Marmorated Stink Bug
The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (Halyomorpha halys) is a small insect in the Pentatomidae family of shield bugs. It is called the Stink Bug because it has an unpleasant smell when it is squashed.
The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug has a dark-brown and bluish hard, shield-shaped exo-skeleton and a cream-coloured underbelly. The shield is called a scutellum. Marmorated means ‘marble-like’ or light and dark bands. Its six greyish-black legs, called tarsi, have three segments. It has forewings (front wings) called hemelytra, and it also has hindwings (back wings). It has a sucking mouthpart.
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