Human interactions with insects include both a wide variety of uses, whether practical such as for food, textiles (especially silk), and dyestuffs, or symbolic, as in art, music, and literature, and negative interactions including damage to crops and extensive efforts to control insect pests.
Academically, the interaction of insects and society has been treated in part as cultural entomology, dealing mostly with "advanced" societies, and in part as ethnoentomology, dealing mostly with "primitive" societies, though the distinction is weak and not based on theory. Both academic disciplines explore the parallels, connections and influence of insects on human populations, and vice versa. They are rooted in anthropology and natural history, as well as entomology, the study of insects. Other cultural uses of insects, such as biomimicry, do not necessarily lie within these academic disciplines.
More generally, people make a wide range of uses of insects, both practical and symbolic. On the other hand, attitudes to insects are often negative, and extensive efforts are made to kill them. The widespread use of insecticides has failed to exterminate any insect pest, but has caused resistance to commonly used chemicals in a thousand insect species.
Practical uses include as food, in medicine, for the valuable textile silk, for dyestuffs such as carmine, in science, where the fruit fly is an important model organism in genetics, and in warfare, where insects were successfully used in the Second World War to spread disease in enemy populations. One insect, the honey bee, provides honey, pollen, royal jelly, propolis and an anti-inflammatory peptide, melittin; its larvae too are eaten in some societies. Medical uses of insects include maggot therapy for wound debridement. Over a thousand protein families have been identified in the saliva of blood-feeding insects; these may provide useful drugs such as anticoagulants, vasodilators, antihistamines and anaesthetics.
Symbolic uses include roles in art, in music (with many songs featuring insects), in film, in literature, in religion, and in mythology. Insect costumes are used in theatrical productions and worn for parties and carnivals.
Cultural entomology and ethnoentomology
Ethnoentomology developed from the 19th century with early works by authors such as Alfred Russel Wallace (1852) and Henry Walter Bates (1862). Hans Zinsser's classic Rats, Lice and History (1935) showed that insects were an important force in human history. Writers like William Morton Wheeler, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Jean Henri Fabre described insect life and communicated their meaning to people "with imagination and brilliance". Frederick Simon Bodenheimer's Insects as Human Food (1951) drew attention to the scope and potential of entomophagy, and showed a positive aspect of insects. Food is the most studied topic in ethnoentomology, followed by medicine and beekeeping.
In 1968, claimed cultural entomology as a branch of insect studies, in a review of the roles insects played in folklore and culture including religion, food, medicine and the arts. In 1984, Charles Hogue covered the field in English and from 1994 to 1997, Hogue's The Cultural Entomology Digest served as a forum on the field. Hogue argued that "Humans spend their intellectual energies in three basic areas of activity: surviving, using practical learning (the application of technology); seeking pure knowledge through inductive mental processes (science); and pursuing enlightenment to taste a pleasure by aesthetic exercises that may be referred to as the 'humanities.' Entomology has long been concerned with survival (economic entomology) and scientific study (academic entomology), but the branch of investigation that addresses the influence of insects (and other terrestrial Arthropoda, including arachnids and myriapods) in literature, language, music, the arts, interpretive history, religion, and recreation has only become recognized as a distinct field" through Schimitschek's work. Hogue set out the boundaries of the field by saying: "The narrative history of the science of entomology is not part of cultural entomology, while the influence of insects on general history would be considered cultural entomology." He added: "Because the term "cultural" is narrowly defined, some aspects normally included in studies of human societies are excluded."
Darrell Addison Posey, noting that the boundary between cultural entomology and ethnoentomology is difficult to draw, cites Hogue as limiting cultural entomology to the influence of insects on "the essence of humanity as expressed in the arts and humanities". Posey notes further that cultural anthropology is usually restricted to the study of "advanced", industrialised, and literate societies, whereas ethnoentomology studies "the entomological concerns of 'primitive' or 'noncivilized' societies". Posey states at once that the division is artificial, complete with an unjustified us/them bias. Brian Morris similarly criticises the way that anthropologists treat non-Western attitudes to nature as monadic and spiritualist, and contrast this "in gnostic fashion" with a simplistic treatment of Western, often 17th-century, mechanistic attitude. Morris considers this "quite unhelpful, if not misleading", and offers instead his own research into the multiple ways that the people of Malawi relate to insects and other animals: "pragmatic, intellectual, realist, practical, aesthetic, symbolic and sacramental."Morris, 2006.
Benefits and costs Insect ecosystem services
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) report 2005 defines ecosystem services as benefits people obtain from ecosystems, and distinguishes four categories, namely provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural. A fundamental tenet is that a few species of arthropod are well understood for their influence on humans (such as honeybees, ants, mosquitoes, and spiders). However, insects offer ecological goods and services. The Xerces Society calculates the economic impact of four ecological services rendered by insects: pollination, recreation (i.e. "the importance of bugs to hunting, fishing, and wildlife observation, including bird-watching"), dung burial, and pest control. The value has been estimated at $153 billion worldwide. As the ant expert E. O. Wilson observed: "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos." A Nova segment on the American Public Broadcasting Service framed the relationship with insects in an urban context: "We humans like to think that we run the world. But even in the heart of our great cities, a rival superpower thrives ... These tiny creatures live all around us in vast numbers, though we hardly even notice them. But in many ways, it is they who really run the show. The Washington Post stated: "We are flying blind in many aspects of preserving the environment, and that's why we are so surprised when a species like the honeybee starts to crash, or an insect we don't want, the Asian tiger mosquito or the fire ant, appears in our midst. In other words: Start thinking about the bugs."
Pests and propaganda
Human attitudes toward insects are often negative, reinforced by sensationalism in the media. This has produced a society that attempts to eliminate insects from daily life. For example, nearly 75 million pounds of broad-spectrum insecticides are manufactured and sold each year for use in American homes and gardens. Annual revenues from insecticide sales to homeowners exceeded $450 million in 2004. Out of the roughly a million species of insects described so far, not more than 1,000 can be regarded as serious pests, and less than 10,000 (about 1%) are even occasional pests. Yet not one species of insect has been permanently eradicated through the use of pesticides. Instead, at least 1,000 species have developed field resistance to pesticides, and extensive harm has been done to beneficial insects including pollinators such as bees.
During the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact countries launched a widespread war against the potato beetle, blaming the introduction of the species from America on the CIA, demonising the species in propaganda posters, and urging children to gather the beetles and kill them.Ukraine’s Reins Weaken as Chaos Spreads , The New York Times (4 May 2014)
Practical uses As food
Entomophagy is the eating of insects. Many edible insects are considered a culinary delicacy in some societies around the world, and Frederick Simon Bodenheimer's Insects as Human Food (1951) drew attention to the scope and potential of entomophagy, but the practice is uncommon and even taboo in other societies. Sometimes insects are considered suitable only for the poor in the third world, but in 1975 Victor Meyer-Rochow suggested that insects could help ease global future food shortages and advocated a change in western attitudes towards cultures in which insects were appreciated as a food item. P. J. Gullan and P. S. Cranston felt that the remedy for this may be marketing of insect dishes as suitably exotic and costly to make them acceptable. They also note that some societies in sub-Saharan Africa prefer caterpillars to beef, while Chakravorty et al. (2011)Chakravorty, J., Ghosh, S., and V. B. Meyer-Rochow. (2011). Practices of entomophagy and entomotherapy by members of the Nyishi and Galo tribes, two ethnic groups of the state of Arunachal Pradesh (North-East India). Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 7 (5) point out that food insects (highly appreciated in North-East India) are more expensive than meat. The economics, i.e., the costs involved collecting food insects and the money earned through the sale of such insects, have been studied in a Laotian setting by Meyer-Rochow et al. (2008).Meyer-Rochow V. B., Nonaka K., Boulidam S. (2008) More feared than revered: Insects and their impacts on human societies (with specific data on the importance of entomophagy in a Laotian setting. Entomologie Heute 20: 3–25 In Mexico, ant larvae and corixid water boatman eggs are sought out as a form of caviar by gastronomes. In Guangdong, water beetles fetch a high enough price for these insects to be farmed. Especially high prices are fetched in Thailand for the giant water bug Lethocerus indicus.
Insects used in food include honey bee larvae and pupae, mopani worms, silkworms,Robinson, Martin; Bartlett, Ray; Whyte, Rob. Korea (2007). Lonely Planet publications, , . page 63 Maguey worms, Witchetty grubs, crickets, grasshoppers and locusts. In Thailand, there are 20,000 farmers rearing crickets, producing some 7,500 tons per year.
In medicine