'Tadaima' is a Japanese equivalent of 'I'm home!' I have returned from home-home to another home on the other side of the world, and before you worry for my loyalty/commitment to either, please look at this photo - 

In a village filled with beautifully-kept vegetable gardens, mine is a veritable jungle. This year has seen an unprecedented amount of rain across central Japan, and everything that I planted during the spring has shot up in the weeks I've been away. 

But search below and between the tangled vines and climbers (and these sunflowers, rendered horizontal by a typhoon but still reaching for the sun), and there are vegetables!

Sunflowers AND giant purple ladies fingers? It's left me speechless.

But it gets better - my wasps are also looking very healthy. I think it's a fairly safe bet to say that, one of the main reasons that after six weeks absence I'm able to enjoy such a harvest, is that the wasps have been busy eating all of the pest insects! So - thank you, wasps. It's good to be back.

Lots! Many are domesticated for their products and/or properties, and have been for years (examples include: lac insects for shellac; cochineal beetles for dyes; ants and wasps for pest control; honeybees and stingless bees for honey, beeswax, propolis, crop pollination; and silkworm for silk.) 

But many edible insects are also 'managed' by humans in ways that have significant effects on the insects themselves: They reach higher numbers and higher densities, they live in man-made environments and feed on human foods, much like mammalian domesticates. They include: Crickets and grasshoppers in the Americas, Asia and Oceania; many species of Saturniidae (silk-producing caterpillars) across southern Africa; stinkbugs in Asia and Africa; palm weevils in Asia, Oceania and Africa; weaver ants in southeast Asia; aquatic Hemiptera in South America; wasps (of course) in Asia - and perhaps many, many others.

Insects are also domesticated by other insects. Ants are known to 'keep' aphids and caterpillars, milking them for their secretions and even collecting and protecting their eggs in purpose-built chambers within their nests. (The holy manna of the Bible is also an insect secretion, by the way, and in the early 20th century this was still eaten as a delicacy in some parts of the world - perhaps it still is). 

Anyway..this question is really just a way of introducing a recent research poster made in collaboration with Kenichi Nonaka - The biogeography of insect semi-domestication. We're presenting this today at the International Geographical Union Regional Conference in Krakow, Poland, and it's part of an ongoing project looking at examples of insect 'domestication' from around the world. Here it is (I'll try to put up a higher-resolution image later):

This is a really interesting question, and a comprehensive answer can be found in a new white paper produced by Reed Business Media and PROTEiNSECT: click here to read.

(But, the paper also raises further questions - What is the nature of the 'improved immunity' that characterises Chinese chickens fed on insects? In what way is the meat form these chickens 'better quality'? As far as I know, these questions are yet to be answered.)

Yes, and, apparently yes - and here's a good recent example: Hopper Foods has just successfully crowd-sourced over $30,000 to bring their sustainably-farmed cricket protein bars to mainstream supermarkets in the US. Their first products are the Hopper bars, available in three different flavours and soon to be available online from $3 a bar. Here's their Kickstarter page, $31,791 and counting.