Dung beetles keep the land healthy for grazing cattle.
BENEFICIAL BUGS Read the following article. Pay special attention to the words in bold.
Are you afraid of spiders? How about insects such as roaches, ants, or bees? If your answer is “yes,” you are not alone. Most people don’t like them—and for good reason. Insects and spiders look scary. They have lots of legs, and they fly or move fast. Also, some of them bite, and sometimes this causes pain or even illness. (Usually, a spider’s bite doesn’t hurt, though.)
They feed us. Bees do a lot for us, for example. Everyone knows that bees make honey, which we use in food, drinks, and medicine. But bees also pollinate2 plants. When they do this, it gives us many fruits and vegetables. In fact, the U.S. uses bees to grow about 30 percent of its crops3. They protect our food. Farmers grow crops for food, but many insects eat these plants. Luckily, we have ladybugs and spiders. They kill bad bugs and protect our food. A ladybug,
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for example, eats about 5,000 insects a year, and a spider eats about 2,000. Thanks to spiders and ladybugs, a farmer doesn’t need to use as many pesticides. They clean the environment.
Insects and spiders can be scary, but they aren’t all bad. In fact, many help us. Here’s how.
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DID YOU KNOW?
Spiders and insects are members of the largest group of animals on Earth (called arthropods). For every one person, there are 1.4 billion insects and millions of spiders. Luckily, many are small, and they don’t live very long.
Many insects and spiders eat waste on the ground—for example, old food or dead animals and plants. On one street in New York City, spiders, ants, and roaches consume about 2,100 pounds (950 kilos) of food on the ground each year. That’s the same as 60,000 hot dogs! Eating this food waste cleans the environment and keeps it healthy.
bug: an informal word for insect to pollinate: to give material from one plant to another so that the plant reproduces and makes seeds and fruit 3 crops: plants that we grow for food 1 2
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