Some insects we like, some not so much
Butterfly 3
Originally uploaded by Damian Cugley. Our wildflower garden is looking pretty now, with plenty of water-fattened native flowers showing their colours. It has also proven attractive to various differently coloured butterflies. This pleases us.
Our garden is also attractive to ants. Lots and lots of ants. We can't leave a pot shard or a greenhouse kit or a compost heap lying about for five minutes without an ant colony materializing and creating swarms of winged ants. Having discovered that ants are, evolutionarily speaking, wasps that chose to exchange their wings for hideous mass mind control, we are less pleased to find ants crawling over everything we own than we are about the butterflies.
Bees we like, especially if they are fat, round, and black or red. We go to some lengths to try to photograph them in close-up with our funky digital cameras. Wasps, on the other hand, are evil and cause us to run away flapping our hands and shrieking like toddlers in a museum.
One wanders whether this human preference will eventually lead to evolutionary pressure on insects to become more furry and more colourful.