This whole thread is infested with bugs!

If you have agarden pond you might want to attect water boatmen.

You don't want to attract cockroaches.

Water bugs and roaches are not even distantly related. They belong to different orders. Because they look superficially similar, people get confused.

They don't look similar to cockroaches or water bugs.

Myself included in that muddled mass of confused people. Now I know.

Yeah. Now, how to bring that up in a conversation.

One of these days I should tell you about a vacation my parents took us on when I was 12 to Fort Moutrie, South Carolina. You want to know about bugs........I can tell you a bunch about bugs.

Thanks Tsar Stepan, it was hilarious!

When someone notices you have cockroaches, just say, “Oh no, those aren’t cockroaches, those are just water bugs”.

That might work

Give the Latin name of the roach and then launch into a comprehensive natural history of the species. They'll be bored immediately and want to change the subject.

Actually, spiders are not insects, they are arthropods.

Now you're bored and want to change the subject.

Insects are also arthropods.

Did you mean arachnids?

Well, I'm stumped, I don't know what to believe anymore...

When I was fifteen I thought girls would be impressed with science and philosophy stuff like I was.. Nope, you were right, they changed the subject every time! But I was smitten, I figured that later I could interest them in stuff that really mattered, so I let them lead the conversation, figuring I could steer the conversation into something more interesting than spray starch later on. Nope, not happening. Turns out, men weren’t much more interested in talking about that stuff either. Maybe one in a thousand, like Solomon said..

But I wish you were around to give me dating advice sixty years ago.

I heard once that spiders were not insects, because they had 8 legs and insects had 6. I don't remember what the source was.

Well, if you're wrong, we're both wrong.

By the way, all spiders are venomous and can produce spider silk. That eliminates most of the ones we call daddy long legs.

True. Spiders have eight legs and no antennae and no wings.

Insects have six legs, antennae, and most orders have wings.

They all have a tracheolae respiratory system though some of the older spiders have book lungs. With the tracheolae respiratory system, the little tubes or tracheoles connect the tissues directly to the atmosphere via the spiracles or holes on the surface of the body.