Bug Encyclopedia
Search and identify bugs & insects — beetles, butterflies, moths, ants, bees, spiders and more — with size, habitat, danger, behavior, and how to tell them apart.
Yellow Jacket
A smooth-bodied, boldly banded black-and-yellow wasp with a narrow waist, often seen hovering aggressively around outdoor food and sugary drinks in late summer.
wasp
Mud Dauber
A slender, non-aggressive solitary wasp with a distinctively long, thread-like waist, known for constructing tube- or pot-shaped nests out of mud pellets on walls and eaves.
wasp
Bald-faced Hornet
A black-and-white social wasp, actually a type of yellowjacket rather than a true hornet, best known for building large, football-shaped gray paper nests suspended from tree branches or eaves.
wasp
Velvet Ant
A densely fuzzy, brightly colored insect that looks like an oversized ant but is actually a wingless female wasp, instantly recognizable by its thick coat of red, orange, black, or white hair.
wasp
Hornet
A large, robust social wasp with a reddish-brown and yellow patterned body, notably bigger than yellowjackets, building enclosed papery nests often high in tree cavities or wall voids.
wasp
Cuckoo Bee
A slender, wasp-like bee that lacks pollen-carrying hairs because it never gathers its own pollen, instead sneaking into the nests of other solitary bees to lay eggs that hatch and consume the host's food stores.
beeFlat Rock Scorpion
An extraordinarily flattened, long-tailed scorpion that squeezes into paper-thin rock crevices, among the largest scorpions in the world by length.
arachnid
Book Scorpion
A tiny, flattened arachnid that looks like a scorpion in miniature, minus the tail, scuttling sideways through old paper and dusty corners while hunting even smaller pests.
arachnidHarvester Ant
A large, industrious desert ant that clears a bare, sunburned disk of ground around its nest entrance while collecting and storing seeds by the thousands.
ant
Leafcutter Bee
A stout, dark-bodied bee best known not for how it looks but for the neat, circular or oval notches it cuts from leaves, which it uses to line and seal its nest cells.
beeFire Ant Queen
The reproductive powerhouse of a fire ant colony, noticeably larger than the reddish worker ants and equipped with wings before she sheds them to found a new nest.
ant
Squash Vine Borer
A day-flying, wasp-mimicking moth whose orange fuzzy hind legs and metallic wings make it easy to mistake for a wasp as it darts around squash vines.
moth
Fire Ant
A small reddish-brown ant that builds loose, crater-less dirt mounds in sunny open turf and mobilizes large numbers of workers rapidly when the nest is disturbed.
antArmy Ant
A nomadic predator that never builds a permanent nest, instead forming temporary living bivouacs from its own linked bodies and sweeping through the forest floor in massive predatory raids.
antWeaver Ant
A tree-dwelling ant that builds its nest by stitching living leaves together with silk produced by its own larvae, forming elaborate arboreal colonies defended fiercely by its workers.
ant
Wool Carder Bee
A stocky, yellow-and-black solitary bee named for its habit of scraping soft plant fibers from fuzzy leaves to line its nest, with territorial males that aggressively patrol and defend flower patches.
beeSoft Tick
A wrinkled, leathery, bean-shaped tick that hides by day in nests and cracks, emerging briefly at night to feed and then vanish again.
arachnidBird Mite
A minute, pale to reddish mite that lives among feathers and nesting material of wild and domestic birds, sometimes dispersing into nearby buildings when nests are abandoned.
arachnidHoverfly
A slender, bee- or wasp-patterned fly known for its remarkable ability to hover motionless in midair before darting suddenly to a new flower.
fly
Black Garden Ant
A familiar small, glossy black ant that forms visible foraging trails across patios and garden paths and nests beneath stones, pavers, and lawns.
ant
Carpenter Bee
A large, robust bee closely resembling a bumblebee but with a shiny, mostly bald black abdomen, known for excavating tunnel nests into bare, untreated wood.
bee
Bullet Ant
A large, glossy reddish-black rainforest ant, among the biggest ants in the world, that nests at the base of trees and forages individually along trunks and branches of the tropical canopy floor.
antSoldier Fly
A wasp-mimicking fly with a flattened, often metallic body that spends its larval life quietly breaking down decaying plant matter or aquatic debris.
fly
Argentine Ant
A small, uniformly light-brown ant that forms enormous, cooperative supercolonies stretching across entire regions rather than defending small individual nests.
ant