Insects: The Tiny Giants of Nature!

#67 Week 14

Author

Sigrun Sørumgård
April 03, 2025

How well do you know the world of bugs, from bees to beetles?

  1. What is the process by which an insect changes form from larva to adult?

  2. What group of insects do ladybugs belong to?

  3. How many legs does a butterfly have?

  4. What are the names of the eyes that many insects have, which consist of many small lenses, or described another way: many small single eyes (ommatidia) gathered into one “big eye”?

  5. Which insect can live for several years underground before emerging to reproduce? In Norway, this insect is believed to have a 5–7 year life cycle, while the North American ones may have a 13 or 17 year life cycle.

  6. Which insect can pull more than a thousand times its own body weight, and is considered the world's strongest insect?

  7. What type of insect was the first animal to travel to space, in 1947. They were sent to the very edge of the Earth’s atmosphere – and came back alive!

  8. What is the name of the largest butterfly in the world?

  9. Which species of beetle was an important religious symbol in ancient Egypt?

  10. What proportion of the world’s insect biomass consists of ants?

The Wonder Wall

  • In the world, some 1.5 million different kinds (species) of insects been named.

  • Honeybees have to make about ten million trips to collect enough nectar for production of one pound of honey. But a single honeybee colony can produce around 100kg of honey each year – that’s 220 jars!

  • To breathe underwater, the water scorpion uses a snorkel-like tube on its belly. Although it lives in the coastal zone among aquatic plants or rocks, and hunts insects and other small aquatic animals, including small fish fry, it has relatively poor swimming abilities.

Yesterday´s Questions & Answers

  1. What is the atomic symbol for gold?

    Au

  2. Which element is known as the "building block of life", with the atomic symbol C?

    Carbon

  3. What is the group of elements in group 18 called, this is the group farthest to the right in the table?

    The elements in group 18 are called noble gases because they are gases at room temperature and react slightly with other substances (thus they are "noble").

  4. What is the lightest element?

    Hydrogen (H)

  5. Who is considered the founder of the modern periodic table?

    Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was a Russian chemist, best known for creating the first draft of the periodic table.

  6. Which element has the atomic symbol, Fe?

    Iron

  7. What does the atomic number tell us about an element?

    The number of protons in the nucleus

  8. What is the only liquid metal at room temperature?

    Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at ordinary room temperature, and for a metal it has poor thermal and electrical conductivity.

  9. What is the heaviest element found naturally on Earth, it has atomic number 92?

    Uranium (U)

  10. How many elements are there in the periodic table as of March 2025?

    118