| Good afternoon, and welcome to Insect Biology 101. |
| I'd like to begin this course with a few remarks about good insects and bad ones. |
| Bugs are all around us and that's both a benefit and an annoyance, |
| sometimes maybe even serious harm. |
| First, let's talk about the good things that insects do for us. |
| Probably the most important insect for humans, and maybe for all other life, is the bee. |
| Bees help plants in the process of pollination, |
| and thus are necessary to most flowers and fruit-producing trees. |
| That is, they carry pollen from "male" flowers to "female". |
| If it weren't for bees, we'd have very few food plants and no fruit either. |
| In fact, there would be no "we". |
| No less a thinker than Albert Einstein pointed out that, |
| without bees, humanity would be dead within a year or less. |
| We'd starve. It's that simple. |
| That should maybe make us just a little humble. |
| A little less dramatic is the fact that bees also make the honey we eat. |
| Moreover, they produce beeswax, which is useful in candles |
| and it's also used as a first-rate furniture polish. |
| Sure, these may not be vital to our lives, |
| but they can serve as reminders of how important bees are. |
| That's a point I keep coming back to in this course. |
| Though, in all fairness, I should point out that butterflies aid in pollination as well as bees. |
| Now, here in Michigan, what's the worst part of summer? |
| Yep, that's right - mosquitoes. |
| But I'm talking about helpful insects, right? |
| So let's look at the dragonfly first. |
| If there were no dragonflies, there would be even more mosquitoes! |
| Dragonflies mainly eat mosquitoes and also a few other insects. |
| Yes, that's right. |
| They don't just fly around, and they also help to eliminate harmful insects. |
| So, the next time you see a dragonfly, don't you dare kill it! |
| Now let's talk a little about those harmful insects. |
| Take the mosquitoes I just mentioned as an example. |
| Not so many years ago, mosquitoes here in America weren't just annoying. |
| Some were even deadly. |
| They carried malaria and yellow fever. |
| My own ancestor, the Confederate General John Bell Hood, |
| lived through the worst battles of Civil War only to die at age 38 from yellow fever. |
| A pest, not a bullet! |
| Well, besides the mosquitoes, in summer there is also a kind of insect that never seems tired. |
| Right, that is the fly. |
| Before I go on talking, I must mention an African fly called the Tsetse fly, |
| which feeds on blood and can cause serious diseases in the people and animals that it bites. |
| Besides, it is still a bearer of sleeping sickness, |
| which affects around 300,000 people every year in Africa |
| and can be treated only with toxic drugs that are hard to administer. |
| Worse still, the drugs sometimes don't work. |
| Other insects, of course, destroy food crops. |
| In China, for instance, locusts continue to be a danger to the harvest in some areas. |
| Less important, but still annoying, moths eat people's clothes and dust mites slowly destroy carpets. |
| Worse, but still in the home, termites or "white ants" eat wood - the wood of your house. |
| If they are not stopped, they can eventually destroy the whole building. |
| Usually they seriously damage a building before anyone even notices them. |
| So, as we all know, insects can be a real trouble. |
| So, what to do? |
| You can go ahead and start killing harmful insects. |
| In the early decades after the communist revolution in China, |
| Chairman Mao encouraged the people to swat every fly they could see. |
| Slogans on the walls of buildings called them "Little Capitalists". |
| But flies reproduced too quickly for this to be a long-term solution. |
| For some decades in the West, to kill insects with chemicals seemed a good remedy. |
| Unfortunately, chemicals can only be used in a limited area for a limited time. |
| It's a small-scale solution. |
| The insects come back. |
| Worse still, some of the poisons used like DDT were found harmful to the environment. |
| Many kinds of wildlife, like hawks, were harmed. |
| And people in chemical-using rural areas have one of the highest rates of liver cancer in the world. |
| It's no secret that chemicals remain harmful to humans. |
| Like all species, insects adapt to their changing environments at an amazing rate. |
| When a new chemical is introduced to their habitat, |
| the insects that survive are generally the ones with some way of resisting the harmful effects. |
| They then breed with the other survivors, |
| and just like that insects become resistant to most poison in a few generations. |
| An insect generation, remember, is a couple of months at most! |
| So, again we have to ask: what to do? |
| Well, there are biological solutions. |
| Some of these are pretty simple. |
| One is destroying the insects' habitat. |
| You take away their home or food. |
| Cleaning your kitchen is the best way to prevent roaches. |
| No garbage: no food. |
| Getting rid of marshes and swamps eliminates mosquitoes. |
| Other solutions might include bringing in dragonflies or bats in areas where mosquitoes are many. |
| This is a cheaper alternative to chemicals. |
| Biological methods like this also bring no extra pollution to the environment. |
| But you have to be careful. |
| If you change the environment too much, you might be hurting other forms of life accidentally. |
| One recent method of controlling insect populations involves interrupting their breeding cycle. |
| What does that mean? |
| It means "birth control for bugs". |
| Insects are provided with food that makes them unable to reproduce. |
| Since they can't have babies, the population disappears, or nearly so. |
| And since no young are born, |
| resistance is not a problem with no young insects developing increased resistance. |
| Interrupt the life cycle, eliminate the bug! |
| It's clear that we must have an understanding of the life cycle of the insect. |
| At least, that's the plan. |
| We'll go into more detail as the course goes along. |
| Now I will stop here to see whether you have any questions or not. |