Farming ants might sound like a crazy thing to do unless you might like to eat chocolate covered ants. It turns out we can learn a lot from ants and the best way is to build your own ant farm.

Students will read and observer ants to discover how ants are the same and different than people.

Step outside and discover the diversity of insect life in your neighborhood. Insects are the world’s most diverse group of living things, with over 950,000 identified species and counting. You might think that you’d need to travel to the Amazon to study insects, but they can be found practically everywhere—including right where you happen to be.

This video segment from Wild TV takes a closer look at backyard bugs, their habitat and characteristics.

Lights, camera, action! Well maybe not a Hollywood movie, there is a lot to be learned by filming bees. Dr. Biology talks with bee movie maker and neurobiologist Brian Smith. Listen in as the two talk about bees, Bee Movie, and even take trip inside a beehive to check out what is buzzing.

This video segment from NOVA: "The Mystery of Animal Pathfinders" explores honeybee communication and navigation.

Learn about bees, their habitat and how to interact with a swarm in this Wild TV video segment.

In this video segment from WILD TV, learn about bees and the different techniques for handling them.

Students learn to identify several beneficial insects and spiders, including predators and pollinators, then record numbers and types of beneficial insects and spiders that they discover in the outdoors, and discuss ways that the insects and spiders that they observed are adapted to be pollinators or predators.

Bug-go is designed to help the players learn to identify some insects while learning which insects are beneficial and interesting facts about others. The game should be played similar to the game bingo.

Students will explore contemporary artist John Baldessari's mixed-media work of art inspired by a 16th-century drawing of a beetle. After writing a story about a bug's journey, each student will create a mixed-media representation of a bug that is inspired by the contemporary artist's work.

This activity is a biology lab investigation where students create habitats to observe decomposers in a controlled setting.

This activity will include the students observing the monarch life cycle inside the classroom, a field experience observing monarch life on a milkweed plant and drawing it, and back in the classroom students will make a pop-up book of the monarch's life cycle with a short description on each page.

In this video adapted from the Arctic Athabaskan Council, learn how warmer temperatures in the Arctic are transforming the landscape, triggering a host of effects such as permafrost thawing and insect infestations.

Students will use books, encyclopedias, magazines, and the Internet to discover certain facts about an insect of their choice.

There are several different ways to get ants for an ant farm, depending on when you would like to start the farm and how long you would like for your ant farm to last.

This series of activities is designed to teach research strategies. Students use KWL charts to guide their inquiry and publish their results in a collaborative question and answer book.

As you watch a butterfly navigate the flowers in your back yard, or a pesky fly avoid your flyswatter, keep in mind their vision is quite different than yours and mine.

This student-centered Exploration Routine can be used in many different ecosystems and provides a way for students to search for, observe, research, and share discoveries about organisms. It can be used with any type of organism or phenomenon you choose for students to focus on, such as macro-invertebrates in streams or ponds, under-log organisms, insects caught with nets, or plants.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The symbiotic microbial community that many animals have floating freely in their gut is critical to their health and well-being. But some insects, like cereal weevils, take this a step further and host bacteria inside their own cells. These endosymbiotic bacteria reside in massive, specialized cells organized in an organ called the bacteriome. Previous studies have suggested that the cereal weevil bacteriome participates in immune responses. But how, or if, the bacteriome protects its resident bacteria from that immune activity remains unclear. To answer this, researchers activated the cereal weevil innate immune system with pathogen protein fragments and examined the gene expression changes in the bacteriome and its residents. Rather than differentiate between pathogens and symbionts, the cereal weevils protected their endosymbionts with physical separation..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.