Skip to content Why Do House Flies And Insects In General Like To Fly Around The Light Bulbs Orbiting Them – There are 17 million bees for every person on earth. They pollinate plants, eat rotting corpses, eat sludge from your pipes, damage crops, spread disease, kill spiders, repel dragonflies.
Some have even lost their wings to live on the blood of bats, spending their lives scurrying around their hosts’ fur, emerging only to give birth to a single larva – often.
Why Do House Flies And Insects In General Like To Fly Around The Light Bulbs Orbiting Them
“That’s why I love them. They do everything. They get everywhere. They’re loud. And they love to love,” Erica McAllister, Diptera – Flies for All of Us – said at the Museum of Natural History. London.
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Dr. McAllister expresses his love for Diptera in “The Secret Life of Bees,” a short, rich book that is both informative and humorous, both a ode to his favorite creatures and an overview to readers. A pleasant effort.
His book also sources the figure of 17 million, which he says is just an estimate.
Erica McAllister, Curator of Diptera at the Natural History Museum in London and author of The Secret Life of Flies. Credit… Elizabeth Dalziel for The New York Times
Like other writers before him, Dr. McAllister has more than entertainment in mind. She wants to remind the world about the importance of bees to humanity and the planet in general. I’m not just a talking thing.
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Without them, to take just one example, there would be no chocolate. Dr. McAllister himself hates chocolate, but he is fond of the type of bees that feed on the cacao tree: the biter variety. Midges are small insects, especially blood bugs, but chocolate midges love nectar and carry pollen from plant to plant.
Biting midges are actually part of Dr. McAllister’s specialty. She loves all flies, but she focuses on those that are part of the Lower Diptera, including mosquitoes, black flies and, as she says, “anything biting, stabbing, nasty.”
The chocolate midge, on the left, is Goniorelia tridens, a Middle Eastern fruit fly with wings that resemble insects or, as Dr. McAllister sees it, spiders. Credit… Natural History Museum, London
His life among the bees includes museum work and field research. It is a dream job for him. She remembers the first time she returned to the museum, when she was a student, before it actually worked.
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“I found myself in a building with 34 million insects. I said, ‘Oh hey, I really like this.’
Dr. McAllister’s fascination began in childhood. “I had to catch fleas from cats,” she said, examining them with a microscope her parents had given her. But he quickly turned to more terrifying insects.
The rotting corpses of small creatures, even cats, were a treasure trove of insects, which she always admired. “I really love the dark side of nature,” he said, before discussing the lives of spider-killer bees.
Larvae “drive themselves onto spiders” to land on them and fall into the abdomen. Then they eat the spider from the inside. But if the wings are immature, the larva can sleep for a few years, until the spider becomes a large meal.
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Holocephala, or robber bee, whose large eyes and keen vision help it hunt much smaller midges and springtails. Credit… Natural History Museum, London
One of his rare frustrations: “I still have to get my boat fly.” This means that despite spending time in the tropics, no adult bees have laid an egg on their arm or leg so that the larva burrows under their skin and turns into a notoriously painful insect before emerging. Itches.
Many bees provide a great service to us and the planet by taking all kinds of detritus from the biological world, from dead wood to slime down pipes. Drain flies, or sewer flies, clean up human waste. Sometimes, however, they can experience population growth that sends the adults flying, which is annoying. If the carcasses are dispersed into small particles in the air, they are potentially harmful to human health.
And of course there are the flies that feed on corpses – the 1,100 different types of blowflies that have been favored by forensic crime shows. Flies of these flies, like the blue bottle fly, eat the carcasses of mice, men, and everything else.
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Knowing which species lay eggs whose decomposition stages determine how long ago a person became a body. (If it’s Tuesday, it must be the blue bottle.)
The fly: Drosophila melanogaster, commonly called the fruit fly, although Dr. McAllister points out that it actually belongs to the group of vinegar flies.
They are easy to work with and share the same basic DNA as all life. Historically, they formed much of the basis of modern genetics. And now they can provide deeper insights into neuroscience and other fields.
On Thursday, scientists at the Salk Institute reported that their study of how the bee brain works could improve Internet search engines. At the Genelia Research Institute at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia, research is underway to create a wiring diagram of the bee’s brain and then explore in more detail how it thinks.
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And they think, according to Vivek Jayaraman, who runs a lab there, that the bees don’t just react instinctively. Their brains make decisions based on many different elements: smell, memory, hunger and fear, for example. And it is this whole process that he hopes to understand neuron by neuron. “You can potentially go all the way,” he said.
Dr. McAllister acknowledges the importance of Drosophila, albeit with some reluctance. She is very interested in countless other species of bees, from the Antarctic to the Arctic, from the predatory dragonflies that kill them in flight, to the tiny fungus gnats. There are 160,000 known species of bees, and biologists can only estimate the number we don’t know: it’s anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions.
The common fruit fly is essential for studying genetics: humans share 75% of disease-causing genes with Drosophila melanogaster. Credit…Dominic Hart/NASA
Marilyn Zook, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota and a staunch popularizer of insect science, couldn’t agree more. Dr. Zook, whose subject of study is the cricket, also studies a parasitic fly that collects its larvae there.
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I called him out on talking about bees. “Wow,” he said, “you’ll never be asked what your favorite bee is.”
Dr. Zook immediately offered a favorite. “Flies are always cursed by Drosophila,” he said. “But bees are incredibly different.” He mentioned an interest in blowfly research and referred to a classic article and then a book on blowfly hunger by Vincent G. Dethier.
The article showed the physiological process that signals to a mosquito larva that it has, for the time being, eaten enough of the dead object it is feeding on. Dr. Dethier also wrote what can be described as a cult favorite, “To Know a Fly.” Biologists and their followers can be considered a cult.
Bees, among their other virtues, are truly wonderful muses. Consider “A Fly for the Prosecution,” “The Life of the Fly” and “Lards of the Fly,” among others, for the fruit fly crowd.
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Dr. McAllister said his work and book have convinced and delighted those close to him, including an aunt who is thrilled to have a writer in the family. “At first my parents were a little confused,” he said. “But I was an average kid and they let me do whatever I wanted.” Eventually, he said, he realized, “Oh, he did good.” »
Bees can be surprising in their appearance and behavior. Middle Eastern fruit flies have patterns on their wings that resemble spiders. No one knows why. Another bee, Achias rothschildi, must swallow air to inflate its eyeballs when it first emerges as an adult.
Dr. McAllister notes in his book, even limited to his love of bees. Houseflies, for example, may be affected by climate change. According to an estimate, the population may increase by 244% by 2080.
“That’s a lot of flies,” he wrote, “even for my taste.” Many bees are probably also affected by climate change. A recent paper analyzing all insects reported a clear decline that could already be linked to global warming.
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Countless mysteries remain in the world of bees – big ones, like the actual number of bees, and more limited ones, like the giant orange-headed moth, the housefly. It feeds on carcasses, but only those that have been collected, and it comes out at night in winter. It was considered extinct until its discovery a few years ago.
Dr. McAllister is doing his part to solve these and other puzzles by recruiting a new generation of people who share the same instincts.
