Fun Facts about Arthropods - Insects/Spiders/Bugs/Water Animals Can Be Amazing Pets!

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Beekeeping is an urban hobby that is relaxing, interesting, and great for the environment. Where I live, there is an active beekeeping community where people share experiences and mentor novice beekeepers. 

Bees sometimes swarm when their colony gets too crowded and you can rescue the sward (or get an experienced beekeeper to do the rescuing) and then provide a backyard, or deck home for them. 

Each colony has only one queen and many worker bees and drone bees. The worker bees only live for a few weeks, but the queen spends her life making new eggs, so the colony goes on as long as the queen can keep up the pace.

You need to have a bee hive and learn how to keep them pest free and safe, what to do if the queen is sick, and general maintenance of the colony.

Bees provide the necessary pollination of food-making plants as well as making honey.  

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You can collect caterpillars and keep them in an enclosure and watch the metamorphosis in action. Or you can buy catepillars just for this purpose.

I always let the butterflies go freely once they are hatched to help pollinate flowers.

Image by Hanne Hasu from Pixabay

Crayfish are easy to keep as pets. They need shallow ponds and to be kept warm - 70-75 degrees F, 21-23 degrees C. The water should also be about 7.0 pH and clean.

They need places to hide and a separate tank for when they molt, if you have several crayfish together. Molting makes them vulnerable to attack by other crayfish.

Don't keep them with fish, or the fish will become snacks! Feed them shrimp food and worms. They need plant based food, with a little bit of animal protein.

They are fascinating to watch and could be great pets for people who have allergies and who don't have a lot of room.

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Doodlebugs are like having two pets in one.  They are the larvae of antlions and they stay in this stage for years.

Doodlebugs make cone-shaped funnels in the sand where they trap their prey, such as ants. The Doodlebug grabs the ant with their front pinchers and is ferocious like a lion when it traps them.

They are pretty small - less than 2 inches.

The adult antlion looks like a dragonfly.

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These guys don’t fly and they are big - up to 3 inches.

They don’t mind being touched gently so they actually make pretty good pets.

You can keep several together in a habitat, but they can multiply pretty fast if males and females are in one cage.

It is illegal to release them, or any insect, out into the wild after it has been domesticated.

A 5 or 10-gallon aquarium will be enough for several hissing cockroaches. They like the temperature to be in the 70sF.

They will eat pellets, vegetables, and fruit.

They can live up to 5 years.

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You can find praying mantis egg pods in a field and bring them home to hatch.  I’ve gotten egg pods from eBay.  I put these pods in a glass jar for a month or so and then they hatch.  They need continuous warm weather to hatch, so if you get them when it is cold out, it may take a while. 

I always release them right away, but you can keep some in a glass aquarium and see how they mature. Each one should have their own tank and they should be kept warm. 

They feed on insects and spiders. 

I get them for my backyard so they will eat up the mosquitoes.

There are a lot of different mantids, each one has specific different habitat and food needs.

They may molt several times and usually only live for about a year.

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Shrimp are great pets. They don't make a lot of waste and are very sociable, so several of them can be kept in a tank together. They actually help clean your aquarium if they are kept with other (small, peaceful) fish because they like to eat stuff at the bottom of the ground.

They come in many different bright colors.

You can feed them a couple times a week with shrimp food, but they really like to eat just about anything.

They are sensitive to chemical changes in the water, so you need to be sure to use clean water with a pH of 6.8-7.5. It's best to change their water by replacing a small percentage at a time, rather than changing 50% or more of the tank all at once.

Depending on the bredd of shrimp, they may live from 1-6 years.

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They look like sticks! If you look for them in the wild, you’ll have a hard time distinguishing them from actual sticks.

They will eat leaves.

They don’t require a large habitat, but the cage will require frequent cleaning. The tank should be tall because they like climbing and because they will molt by climbing up a branch and crawling out of their skin.

They like the temperature in the 70s F and high humidity.

Female stick insects will lay eggs without males.  The resulting insects will be female, but if a male fertilizes the eggs, males will hatch.

They can live up to one year in captivity.