I talked about your question with my friend Allan Felsot. He’s an insect scientist at Washington State University. He told me cocoons are mostly silk. But they’re usually made by moths. A butterfly ...

Larvae of some paper wasp species use mysteriously fluorescent silk to weave the container in which they mature to adulthood. By Cara Giaimo Adult paper wasps are capable builders, painstakingly mouth ...

In 2019, researchers exploring the southwest coast of Portugal made an unexpected discovery: Hundreds of well-preserved bees had been mummified inside their cocoons for the last 2,975 years. They ...

Insects rarely survive in fossilized form, but a strange series of events somehow killed and preserved these brooding bees for millenniums. By Sarah Derouin A research team was combing the coastline ...