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.
Ant
A small eusocial insect that lives in highly organized colonies, instantly recognizable by its narrow pinched waist, elbowed antennae, and single-file foraging trails.
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Wasp
A slender-waisted, smooth-bodied flying insect typically banded in black and yellow, recognizable by its narrow 'wasp waist' and folded wings, and often social, building paper nests in colonies.
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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.
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House Ant
A small, dark brown to black ant that forages in loose trails along countertops and baseboards and releases a distinctive rotten-coconut smell when crushed.
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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.
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Sugar Ant
A common name for several large, sugar-loving ants, most famously the black-and-orange banded sugar ant of Australia, known for its persistent nighttime foraging around kitchens and picnics.
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Army 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.
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Crazy Ant
A fast-moving, long-legged ant instantly recognizable by its erratic, non-stop scurrying in every direction rather than the orderly trails followed by most other ants.
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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.
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Argentine Ant
A small, uniformly light-brown ant that forms enormous, cooperative supercolonies stretching across entire regions rather than defending small individual nests.
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Weaver 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.
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Pavement Ant
A stocky brown to black ant famous for the dramatic "ant wars" its colonies wage along sidewalk cracks each spring.
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Pharaoh Ant
A tiny, pale-yellow ant that thrives almost exclusively indoors, forming vast interconnected colonies within the warm voids of heated buildings.
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Harvester 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.
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Acrobat Ant
A small ant named for its habit of raising its distinctive heart-shaped abdomen up over its body like an acrobat when disturbed or alarmed.
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Field Ant
A large, common outdoor ant that builds conspicuous mound nests of soil and plant debris in sunny open ground and defends itself by spraying formic acid rather than stinging.
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Ghost Ant
A minuscule ant with a dark head and pale, nearly translucent legs and abdomen that seem to vanish against light-colored surfaces, giving the species its ghostly common name.
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Leafcutter Ant
A highly organized ant famous for marching in long trails while carrying disc-shaped pieces of leaf many times their own size, which they use to cultivate fungus gardens deep underground.
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Carpenter Ant
A large, often shiny black ant that excavates smooth tunnels in dead or damp wood for nesting, recognizable by its size, evenly rounded thorax, and elbowed antennae.
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Digger Wasp
A solitary, ground-nesting wasp that excavates neat burrows in bare soil and provisions them with paralyzed prey for its young.
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Common Wasp
A black-and-yellow social wasp with a distinct anchor-shaped mark on its face, common around gardens and picnics in late summer as its colony reaches peak size and workers seek out sugary food.
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Spider Wasp
A quick, nervous-flying solitary wasp with long spiny legs and constantly flicking wings, recognized for its habit of running across open ground in short bursts while hunting spiders to paralyze and store for its young.
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Trichogramma Wasp
Barely larger than a speck of dust, the trichogramma wasp is one of the tiniest insects known. These minute parasitoids lay their eggs inside the eggs of moths and butterflies.
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Fig Wasp
A pinhead-sized wasp that spends nearly its entire life inside a fig, forming one of the most tightly co-evolved partnerships in nature as it pollinates the tree in exchange for a place to lay its eggs.
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