Migration among the insects is best known in locusts and butterflies. A great number of other insects, however, including some of the smallest, are migrants. Broadly speaking, insect migration is of three types: some insects emigrate on one-way journeys to breed, others migrate from a breeding area to a feeding area, and still others migrate from breeding areas to hibernation sites.

In the first type, adults with a life span limited to a single season emigrate from their breeding site, deposit their eggs, and die. Such migratory flights can be very short or very long but, because they are always one-way journeys, cannot be regarded as migration in its strictest sense. The best-known examples of such flights are those of locusts, particularly the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria), a species found in tropical and subtropical countries of the Old World. The migratory, gregarious form arises from the solitary form as a result of various conditions—e.g., lack of food, crowding.

The desert locusts breed only when and where seasonal rains permit; as a consequence of climatic conditions, therefore, the insects migrate from one breeding area to another. If the available food decreases and the numbers of insects increase too drastically in a particular area, migratory locusts develop. They differ from nonmigratory forms in colour, structure, behaviour, and physiology. Swarms numbering up to 10,000,000,000 individuals periodically invade territories in Africa, southwestern Asia, and southern Europe, covering areas as large as 1,000 square kilometres (400 square miles).

Other migrant insects travel beyond the limits of their breeding range and either die or return to the breeding range. The painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) “migrates” in the spring, when its population becomes too large for local conditions, from the peninsula of Baja California in Mexico to the Mojave Desert in southern California. Eggs are laid in the desert region, but the species does not become permanently established there and makes no return flight. Such movements are known in about 250 species of butterflies.

In the second type of migration—migration in the strict sense—insects migrate from a breeding area to a feeding area. In the feeding area the females develop mature ovaries and then return to lay their eggs in the place from which they came or a similar region.

Cockchafers (Melolontha melolontha), a species of beetle, leave the site where they emerge as adults and move to a feeding area, generally in a forested region, where maturation of the eggs takes place. They then return to the area where they developed from eggs and lay their own eggs. This process may be repeated several times during the life of the insect. Although the distances covered by the cockchafer may not be great, the regularity of the phenomenon is characteristic of true migration.

In the third type of migration, insects travel from their breeding areas to places where they hibernate or estivate—i.e., pass the summer in a dormant state. The place of hibernation or estivation may be outside the zone where climate permits breeding. The following season, they return to the breeding place and lay their eggs. This type of migration, which can involve great distances, is made by insects with unusually long life spans. The lives of these insects include a diapause, or period of dormancy during which development is suspended.

In warm countries the coccinellids, a family of beetles, and certain moths leave the hot lowlands and migrate to the mountains, where they estivate and later hibernate. In spring they return to the breeding areas.

One coccinellid, the convergent ladybug (Hippodamia convergens), lives in valley regions of California, where the eggs hatch in March or April and develop into adults one month later. In early summer they migrate to the mountains, particularly to the Sierra Nevada, where they may lay eggs if food is abundant and the weather warm. Generally, however, the adults gather in clusters and remain inactive until October, when rains initiate a period of activity, after which they travel to lower altitudes and hide in forest litter, passing the winter in a state of dormancy. As many as 30,000,000 ladybugs may congregate on a quarter acre. In spring they mate, fly back to the valleys, lay their eggs, and die.

The flight before diapause of some insect groups may cover thousands of miles. In North America, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is a well-known example of a wide-range migrant with an extensive breeding range. The number of generations varies with the latitude; as many as five generations may occur each year in the south and only one in the north. In summer the insects travel northward to Hudson Bay. Individuals of the last generation of the year migrate southward in autumn to Florida, Texas, and California, where they hibernate after travelling nearly 3,200 kilometres (2,000 miles). They gather in sheltered sites, particularly on trees where they cluster on trunks and big branches. In spring part of the populations migrate back to the northern breeding areas. Some of the returning butterflies are members of the first generation that develops from the overwintered insects; others represent successive generations that develop as the insects progress toward more northern latitudes. The recapture of marked butterflies has revealed that they travel as much as 130 kilometres (80 miles) in one day. The longest distance recorded thus far for the complete flight of a migrant monarch butterfly is 3,010 kilometres (1,870 miles).