Best Of Natural History Radio

Ep 1 of 3. They make up 80% of the species on earth, and at any time there are ten QUINTILLION of them living. Meet the six-legged rulers of the world: INSECTS. Entomologist Erica McAlister is known as Fly Girl to her friends. As Curator of Flies at the Natural History Museum, she knows what remarkable, strange, and diverse animals insects are. The insect world is populated by beings with superpowers - an amazing sense of smell, lightning reflexes, the ability to fly at dizzying speed or walk on the ceiling. And these superpowers have implications for us humans - in medicine, defence, food, art and architecture. They can help us to live more healthily, more safely, more sustainably. In Episode One, Erica discovers that bees' sense of smell can be used to detect explosives and disease.