An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles @vita-insectum - Tumblr Blog

how do you draw insects in chinese painting

artist 新田小写意

Scorp and scorplings! Newborn scorpions ride on their mother’s back until they grow a hard exoskeleton on their first molt.

onenicebugperday

@immodest-moose submitted: This is my favorite time of year because i find cecropia moths everywhere! Found in detroit michigan

Can you BELIEVE we get to see such nice giant bug friends in real life? We are so lucky. Although tragically we don’t have cecropia moths where I live, so you are extra lucky. Look at that fat fuzzy abdomen! Incredible. I am smooching this moth, in my heart. Thank you for sharing :)

mothic-gothic

Hemerophila Diva

Family: Choreutidae

First Described: 1889 by Riley

Found in: Florida and Cuba

snapsicle

roaches playing with a paper towel tube :)

mossworm

acroceridae booty showcase

bowelfly

Extremely Important

rhamphotheca

大艷青尺蛾 - Agathia magnificentia inoue, family Geometridae

- Tianone (1100m), Ilan County, Taiwan

(photo: Shipher Wu)

year-2003

natureatlogans

Stonefly! Not sure what type it was but oh boy was it cool to see another one!

deactivated-blog

Endestes incilis Pascoe, 1863 by Udo Schmidt Via Flickr: Family: Colydiidae (Zopheridae) Size: 5.2 mm Location: Bolivia, Santa Cruz, 3,7 km SSE Buena Vista, Hotel Flora & Fauna, 405 m leg. M.Thomas & B.Dozier, 5.-15.XI.2001; det. Schuh, 2009 Photo: U.Schmidt, 2016

onenicebugperday

Bearded palm weevil (Rhinostomus barbirostris), Belize Photos by Nicky Bay on Flickr // Facebook // Website

Photos shared with permission; do not remove credit or repost.

arcticarthropod

It’s so apelike. It’s so much like an orangutan!

mantischildren

makes pspspspsps sounds at a bug

fumblebeefae

Can you talk about vulture bees, please?

Vulture bees are Americans stingless bees (Meliponini) within the genus Trigona (they still have nothing on our Aussie bees). There’s only three species of them: Trigona necrophaga, Trigona crassipes, and Trigona hypogea (of which there are two subspecies t.h robustior and t.h hypogea).

T. necrophaga specimen

They’re called as such because of their unique obligate necrophagy, aka. instead of pollen they harvest meat off carcasses. They collect paste-like and liquefied rotting flesh and turn this into proteinaceous food which (in common with other stingless bees) they store in pots within their hives. They also create a sort of “honey”-like substance (sometimes dubbed corpse-honey) which they make by collecting juice from fruit. They were reported to never visit flowers, making meat from carcasses their main food source.As of yet no one has tired this honey because it probably would kill them or at the very least make them sick.

T. hypogea bees feeding on lizard carcass.

They’ll eat most carrion they can find including lizards, mammals, birds and so on and, like maggots, tend of enter larger carcasses through the eyes. T. hypogea are different from the other vulture bees in that they have five pointed teeth on the end of each mandible. which seems to have led to unique behavioural adaptions such as aggressive foraging beaviour, in that this species will often rob / attack competitors for access to food and nest sites.

What makes these stingless bees unique isn’t just the fact they harvest and live on meat (as there are many bee species that do so also), but rather that they only live on meat and no longer harvest flowers at all. This makes them quite unusual in terms of other stingless bees (Meliponini).

Foraging behavior of T. hypogea on broods from a recently abandoned wasps’ nest (Parachartergus smithii)

flavoracle

CUT MY LEAF INTO PIECES

AND THEN WE DRAG AND SORT

FERMENTATION

AND SEEDING

CAN’T EAT A FUNGUS IF I’M NOT FUNGUS BREEDING

flavoracle

I don’t think y'all understand how round of this post I really am. I scheduled to reblog it as one of my “Favorite Posts of 2019” just a couple hours after I created it back in February