Why we need insects

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, insects

I suspect that the subtitle was the author's original choice for a title, and that the punchier title came via the publisher's marketing arm. In Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson (translated by Lucy Moffatt), we find nearly nothing about buzzing, stinging or biting, and a great deal about the role of insects in nature, and most particularly that vast portion of nature that we humans appropriate for our use.

For example, we are familiar to the point of boredom with the need for honeybees to pollinate many crops. And you may be familiar with the giant industry of trucking millions of beehives to central California to pollinate almond flowers—and of the need to truck them right back out again to somewhere they can get food when the almond bloom is over. But I didn't now that tomatoes taste much better when pollinated by bumblebees, which are big enough and rough enough to do a thorough job of it; nor of the few species of midges that are the only pollinators of cacao flowers—and that they are endangered so, if they go, so goes chocolate. And if you think you'd never, ever eat a wasp: you do, every time you eat a fig or fig bar. Tiny fig wasps are essential to fig production, and they die in the fig after laying their eggs, but I'll let you off the hook on this one, because the tiny bodies are mostly (but only mostly!) consumed by the fig as it matures.

Insects are the vanguard of the clean-up crew worldwide. Without dung beetles the plains of Africa would be knee-deep in the dung of elephants, rhinos, wildebeests, giraffes, and antelopes, to say the least. Similar beetles feed dung to their young in the steppes of Asia and both South and North America. Insects also lead the way when disposing of carcasses, or their remnants when the bigger predators have eaten their fill.

There is something worth learning on nearly every page.

• That the most colorfast red dye, carmine or cochineal, is produced by a bug that feeds on cactus. Fortunately, prickly pear cacti are in no danger of extinction. Not only were those old, red 1¢ postage stamps made with carmine, so were and are the red coats of British soldiers, the "redcoats" of revolutionary-war-era fame. We still use tons of carmine yearly. 
• That certain fly larvae excel at cleaning wounds, removing dead tissue and bacteria but never touching live tissue—and that Genghis Khan (probably) had a "maggot wagon" along for his armies' battles. 
• That insects may be the food of the future even in the West; they are already on the menu in many parts of the world. To produce a pound of protein, certain insects require much less feed and produce much less methane and carbon dioxide than beeves or swine.

The key takeaway: we cannot get along without insects, but they can get along very well (or even, much better) without us. Rather than wax long, I'll leave it to you to read the book. Much recommended!