Beneficial insects include bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, and others that pollinate plants. In the United States, the value of crops that require or benefits from pollination by insects totals about $5 billion a year. Many fruits, including oranges, apples, plums, strawberries, blackberries, pears, and grapes, depend on insect pollinators for the production of seeds. So do such vegetables and field crops as peas, onions, carrots, cabbages, clobber, alfalfa, and cotton. Insects also pollinate carnations, morning-glories, orchids, magnolias, and other lovely flowers.
Insects are an import food source of birds, fish, frogs, lizards, skunks, and many other animals. Insects even serve as food for such plants as Venus's-flytraps, pitcher plants, and sundews. Many people also eat insects. In South Africa, some people roast termites and eat them by the handful, like popcorn. Mexicans make a cake out of the eggs of water boatmen. Many stores in the United States sell fried caterpillars and chocolate-covered bees and ants.
Insects provide us with products worth millions of dollars yearly. These products include honey and beeswax, made by bees, shellac, made from a substance given off by lac insects; and silk, produced by silkworms.
Many insects help keep the landscape clean by feeding on animal wastes and dead animals, or the remains of dead plants. Insects that live in the ground enrich the soil with their waste products and dead bodies.
Many insects are beneficial because they are predators. They feed on harmful insects. One predator, the ladybug eats several kinds of crop-destroying insects. Other helpful insects are the parasites that live in or on the bodies of harmful insects. For example, some wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars that damage tomato plants. As the young develop, they feed on the caterpillars and kill them.
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