This chapter introduces frass, silk, diapause, fungal gardens, and antibiotics.

Frass is the term referring to the debris and excrement of insects. Here's a cute article about frass.

When most people think of silk, they think of caterpillars and spiders, but other insects make and use silk as well, like bees and ants. And while bees and ants mostly use silk for making cocoons, weaver ants go a step further and use silk to create leafy enclosures. In the second half of this video, you'll see weaver ants at work using their larva as tools. Because silk is so durable and hard to break, due to it's elasticity, sentient insects would probably develop tools to cut it, like an enzyme dispensing silkskiver. That wouldn't be farfetched considering stink bug saliva can reduce the elasticity of spider webs and make them easier to break.

Diapause is a suspension of metabolic activity that occurs in insects.

Many insects cultivate fungal gardens to grow food. Look at the elaborate work of these leaf-cutter ants. And here is another of a neat fungus garden.

And to keep the fungus from going bad, ants use antibiotics to treat their gardens.