March 18, 2019 – Amusives

Ant

The Quippery

Ants are healthy because they have little antibodies.
– WallingfordSign.com –

Ants can carry twenty times their own body weight. Which is useful information if you’re moving out and you need help getting a potato chip across town.
– Ron Darian –

Here are a few things to keep in mind the next time ants show up in the potato salad. The 8,800 known species of the family Formicidae make up from 10% to 15% of the world’s animal biomass, the total weight of all fauna. They are the most dominant social insect in the world, found almost everywhere except in the polar regions. Ants turn more soil than earthworms; they prune, weed and police most of the earth’s carrion. Among the most gregarious of creatures, they are equipped with a sophisticated chemical communications system. To appreciate the strength and speed of this pesky invertebrate, consider that a leaf cutter the size of a man could run repeated four-minute miles while carrying 750 lbs. of potato salad.
– R.Z. Sheppard –

I bought an ant farm. I don’t know where I am going to get a tractor that small!
– Steven Wright –

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.
– Bill Vaughan –

Bee

Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.
– Mary Kay Ash –

Bees shouldn’t be so nice and fuzzy.
– Cynthia Copeland Lewis –

To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee.
– William H. Walton –

Butterfly, Caterpillar

Even if you make a really nice place for it to live, with grass and dirt and a few rocks and sticks, the caterpillar will still spend all its time trying to get out of the jar.
– Cynthia Copeland Lewis –

Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one. It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake – as almost all hats are.
– Nikolaus Laszlo, Nora Ephron, and Delia Ephron, You’ve Got Mail –

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller –

True you’re a butterfly now, but you still think like a caterpillar.
– Shaun Murphy and Layton Fisher –

Ladybug

How brave a ladybug must be!
Each drop of rain is big as she.
Can you imagine what you’d do,
If raindrops fell as big as you?
– Aileen Fisher –

Ladybugs all dressed in red
Strolling through the flowerbed.
If I were tiny just like you
I’d creep among the flowers too!
– Maria Fleming –

The Ladybug wears no disguises.
She is just what she advertises.
A speckled spectacle of spring,
A fashion statement on the wing….
A miniature orange kite.
A tiny dot-to-dot delight.
– Patrick Lewis, “The Little Buggers” –

The ladybug’s a beetle.
It’s shaped like a pea.
Its color is a bright red
With lots of spots to see.
Although the name is ladybug
Some ladybugs are men.
So why don’t we say “gentleman bug”
Every now and then?
– Author Unknown –

Mosquito

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.
– Betty Reese –

If only mosquitoes sucked fat instead of blood.
– Author Unknown –

Mosquitoes remind us that we are not as high up the food chain as we think.
– Tom Wilson –

The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
– Andy Warhol –

We’ve all known intimidation – one mosquito in a dark bedroom.
– Chan Harris –

Why didn’t Noah swat those two mosquitoes?
– Author Unknown –

Other

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
– Primo Levi –

God in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
– Ogden Nash, “The Fly” –

Great fleas have little fleas
upon their backs to bite ’em
and little fleas have lesser fleas
and so ad infinitum.”
– DeMorgan, Budget of Paradoxes –

House, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary –

Life is hard for insects. And don’t think mice are having any fun either.
– Woody Allen –

Some primal termite knocked on wood;
and tasted it, and found it good.
That is why your Cousin May
fell through the parlor floor today.
– Ogden Nash –

The Amazon rain forest has 2.5 million species of insects. That’s more bugs than iOS 7.
– Internet meme, c.2013 –

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
– Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton, 1888 –

The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.
— Warder Clyde Allee –

Though snails are exceedingly slow,
There is one thing I’d like to know.
If I out run ’em round the yard,
How come they beat me to the chard?
– Allen Klein –

To see every day how people get the name “genius” just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name “millipede”—not because they have that many feet, but because most people don’t want to count to 14—this has had the result that I don’t believe anyone any more without checking.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg –

Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves. The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important. But six legs are too many from the human standpoint.
– Joseph W. Krutch –