Eight out of ten animals are insects. We are unaware of the number of relationships that human beings have with they. And almost all of them are positive. Some have to do with our food, others with our homes and, of course, some with our health. The reason we don't have them in mind, despite their enormous species richness and abundance, is their small size.

Identifying them is easy: six pairs of legs, two pairs of wings (with some exceptions), organized in head-thorax-abdomen -no, centipedes and spiders are not insects-.

The day begins
I had breakfast with honey - made by bees, of course - and cereals that have grown free of the insects that wanted to feed on the plant. They have not been able to, thanks to the use of dangerous pesticides.

In the kitchen, a small, colored fly flies over me. It could have come out of a piece of slightly rotten fruit that had larvae inside.

Next to me, one of my sons is scratching his head, does he have lice?

Before leaving, I clean the windows of the house and, under the window sills, I meeting some mud tubes. They are potter wasps, which capture spiders to feed them to the larvae that develop inside, confined until they become adults.

On a stroll
When I go for a walk in the neighborhood, I notice sticky sidewalks because aphids have dropped traces of the sap they feed on in the trees. My car, parked under one of them, has suffered a shower of sweet drops. I take the opportunity to clean it and peel "bugs" off the windshield, especially the nectar of crushed bees.

The gardens of the park are full of colorful life, especially in spring and summer: butterflies on the flowers, bees and bumblebees doing the important work of pollination. Some invasive hornets(we already have here another one, the Vespa soror) look for insects to feed their larvae or water to cool the hornet nest.

Later, in autumn, it will not be strange to see "giant mosquitoes" attached to the walls of buildings. They are always near plots with grass, because their larvae, large worms, feed on their roots.

In some plants, the leaves have bite marks. If they are small, they are due to a beetle called Otiorhynchus. Others are larger and may be due to the leaf cutter bee or Megachile.

At lunchtime, chatting with the Mexican waiter at the restaurant, he told me that in his country they eat more than 600 different species of insects. And I had only heard of "chapulines", a subject of grasshoppers, smaller than the one I saw perched on a wall when I took my daughter to high school

The afternoon arrives
I go out again for a walk, now with my dog, vaccinated against Leishmaniawhich he could get from the bite of small flies called phlebotomids.

We pass by the river, where insect larvae breed and spend the first part of their cycle in the water. Some of them will feed the trout, barbels and other species that give life to these ecosystems. They are dragonflies, pearls, trichoptera and mayflies.

Also in the fresh water of ponds and puddles , mosquito larvae develop and then, especially at dusk, they can bite us to feed on blood (only the females) and sometimes transmit diseases.

Massive spraying will not solve the problem, but rather aggravate it because the insects that feed on them, the "useful fauna", will die along with the mosquitoes. It is very important to maintain the balance of biodiversity in all ecosystems so that there are no species that shoot up their numbers.

Meanwhile, swallows and swifts fly, sometimes higher and sometimes lower. It depends on the weather, which causes their prey, thousands of flies and mosquitoes, to fly at different heights.

When it gets dark, with the good spring weather, more and more moths swirl around the street lamps. Some will feed the bats, which also rid us of thousands of mosquitoes every night.

Pets, forced or not
Imagine having an insect as a pet? It is not common in Europe, but it is in Eastern countries. There they breed, for example, large wood-eating larvae that are huge beetles when they are adults.

At least my house is brick and I don't have to be vigilant about the likelihood that the structure is weakened because the beams are being hollowed out by termites. In old houses in the villages , you would hear the "death watch" while watching over the deceased: it was the males of a species of woodworm knocking on the wood to attract the females.

Also increasingly a thing of the past is the torture of bed bugs, which hide anywhere in the bedroom during the day and come out at night to suck your blood after climbing into bed.

Essence in ecosystems
Back at home, my children are doing their homework, and it's their turn to study biodiversity. They tell me that there are more than 1.5 million different species of insects(there are only 1,500 mammals).

What would happen if there were no insects in our world? Although they may seem annoying at times, they are essential to maintaining the balance of nature. So the next time we see one, let's not step on it! Let's think about the crucial role they play for the ecosystems around us and, directly, in our daily lives.

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original.