**6. Farmed edible and medicinal insects**

Humans have been eating insects for millennia [58, 163]. However, human entomophagy is a long-standing taboo in westernized societies [19, 58, 164]. This can explain why insect farming for human food supply has been largely absent from the main agricultural innovations and domestications with few exceptions such as honey bees, silkworms (i.e., pupae is a by-product of silk production), and scale insects [19, 73]. Yet, more than 2 billion of people eat insect regularly since there are a source of protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals frequently stored and sold in developing countries (review in [73, 164]). Across the world, more than 2000 insect species are considered as edible for human food or animal feed [19, 58, 164, 165]. Beside food, insects provide many natural products for drugs to treat human diseases [166, 167].

Overall, the most commonly consumed insects by humans or livestock/pets are beetles (Coleoptera) (31%), caterpillars (Lepidoptera) (18%), bees/wasps/ants (Hymenoptera) (14%) as well as crickets (Orthoptera) (13%) [19, 58, 73, 163–165]. Most of these insects, as well as those used as entomoceuticals, are harvested in the wild [163] but some of these species are farmed for sale and profit [19, 73]. Currently, commercially farmed insects include (i) the house cricket (*Acheta domesticus*), the palm weevil (*Rhynchophorus ferrugineus*), the giant water bug (*Lethocerus indicus*), and water beetles (various species of Coleoptera) for human consumption [58, 168, 169] and (ii) bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, and cockroaches for drug production [167]. Even in small-scale production in developing countries [19], their production implies that their life cycle is controlled by human in captive conditions isolated from their wild counterparts in order to meet regulations about human food production (i.e., hygienic standards, sterile conditions) as well as limiting pathogen spillover from/to the wild [19, 164, 169–171]. Such conditions are conductive for an advanced domestication process (Level 4, **Figure 1**) through a directed pathway. Conversely, other species are produced through an increasing human manipulation of their environment to increase insect yields and to ensure their long-term availability as food [172]. For instance, edible social wasps (Hymenoptera, Vespidae, *Vespula flaviceps,* and *V. shidai* in Japan) are traditionally managed by keeping wasp nests collected in the wild in hive boxes during one season to improve yields [173]. However, current attempts to improve the practice involves efforts to maintain new queens in captive condition over several generations [173], paving the ways to a prey domestication pathway.
