Episode 1

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. But for most of us, insects are pests - something we swot, or repel, or catch in a jar and hastily eject from the house. In this three part series, Erica will take listeners on an adventure in insect-world. It's our world, but not as we know it.

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.

Series Consultant: Bridget Nicholls, Director, Pestival.