I've been looking in to this but there doesn't seem to be a very clear answer as to whether or not urine does help with jellyfish stings. The idea is to try and reduce the pain, but also, if you have a tentacle stuck to you, to try and prevent any more of those nematocysts from firing. I was looking round and I couldn't find any scientific studies that were prepared to look at why urine might have an effect on this. It certainly is something of a traditional treatment and it's something you have access to if you don't have access to vinegar. Vinegar is a much more usual treatment for jellyfish stings and has been tested. There was a study reported in New Scientist a few years ago saying that they tested coca cola and four day old wine because they're very acidic. They can help reduce the pain and stop the firing of these nematocysts. We think it might be something to do with the vinegar dehydrating the nematocyst cells and stopping them being able to fire. But if you only have urine, it might work. Also, males have more sterile urine than females, so if you can ask a male to provide the necessary, then that's great.

I'm not quite sure but commercial companies have actually quantified the amount of insect material we're allowed to eat and drink in chocolate and cornflakes and so on. If they're quantifying it, then we must be eating it. In chocolate you measure insect parts per million. I would say we probably eat more than we would like. A little extra protein perhaps. People catch flies in great numbers in Lake Victoria, they're called Lake fly, and I have eaten them. They taste like shrimps, which is rather unexpected! They look like tiny midges and come in huge clouds. They compact them down into small fly cake. Flies are delicious! They were just dried and it's a good way to do something with the huge biomass emerging from the lakes. I've had fried termites in Uganda and they're nice too.

I think they probably were quite irritated. Insects can be temporarily blinded by very bright light, but when they go into the dark again, their photo-pigment would be regenerated. There are some ants that live in very bright conditions in the desert. They would have pigment that would protect their sensitive photocells. In addition to that, all their neural machinery behind their eyes would act to adapt to avoid bright lights. The whole system is geared up to adjust the gain, like if you point a video camera at a bright scene. You can see that the camera adapts. That's what an insect would do if it lived in a very bright condition.

There is a varroa mite which is rushing through populations of honey bees in Europe, but I'm afraid I don't know about the American situation. This is a very serious pest, which is causing a lot of concern in European hives. I imagine the same thing is happening in America but I'm afraid I don't know. The mite gets into the cells where the larvae are growing and eats and kills them. It's very contagious and gets from colony to colony while doing large amounts of damage. Bees are very hygienic and spend a lot of time cleaning. I imagine this is a relatively new thing that has come into their system and they're not yet properly adapted to it.

A beetle with eyelashes on the end is like a scarab beetle or a chafer beetle. The technical name is Lamellicorn beetles. They use the antennae for picking up pheromones, scents and chemicals and things. So it could be some kind of chafer beetle, a rosechafer or something like that. It's also a good idea to look for a picture on the internet, as you'll find out for certain what it is you have found.

Someone's looked at ant behaviour patterns by following the whole colony over a matter of days, and they have very definite patterns where the whole colony seems to shut down and rest. They then start again in a few hours until in a very specific rhythm, they stop again. They do have rhythms of behaviour although I'm not sure whether that's sleeping, but at least resting. They're not active all the time.

Although cockroaches are quite big insects, they're quite flat dorso-ventrally, so that they might have been able to crawl in through a very small hole. Alternatively, if they had laid their eggs between the tins, the eggs may have hatched and perhaps developed there. They're very flat and could squeeze in.

It's not radar. They just have scouts that are foraging round from the home colony, and when one does hit a nice bit of food like your mother's food, he or she will then go back to the colony and recruit lots more. They then form a trail to the honey. There are also many species of ant. There are several thousand in the world and they're probably one of the most important species in the world.