Love bugs are not so lovely

If you’ve been in hiding or haven’t left your room over the past few weeks, you may be completely unaware of a problem we are current experiencing. That problem is the latest infestation of a particular insect here in Columbia County. Well, in this whole part of the world would be a more accurate statement. My wife got them all over her vehicle when she made a trip to Shreveport this past weekend.

The insect in question is the love bug, a species of march fly found in parts of Central America and the Southeastern United States, which includes us. Unfortunately. Anyway, the insect is also known as the honeymoon fly or double-headed bug because the adult pairs remain coupled, even in flight, for several days during and after mating. Very strange.

What that means is you have a bug that looks like it has too heads, one on each end. They can’t sting or anything like that, but when they exist in their present numbers they can sure mess up a vehicle. I can personally attest to that, as our Tahoe is presently covered with several hundred of the little critters. This all makes me wonder if they might have some kind of deal with the car washes. Hey, stranger things have happened.

Back to the bug: The female lays her eggs in moist soil and, when they hatch, the larvae consume the organic matter that surrounds them. Ditches and swampy areas are their kingdoms, which might go a long way toward explaining the numbers of insects we’re seeing this year. I’ve lived here for most of my life and, frankly, I’ve never seen the number of love bugs we are encountering today. That wet July and August—it did have unexpected consequences for us.

Anyway, all this love bug mess has reminded me of another insect infestation I went through one time in my life. And it was much worse if you can believe that. Let me explain. I was living in Abilene, Texas, at the time, and we had an extremely wet spring season. That seemed to me like a very positive thing, especially considering the fact that Abilene doesn’t get that much rain every year, anyway. I was wrong.

After the wet spring ended and summer approached, I began to notice quite a few crickets in the downtown area where the store I managed was located. That seemed strange to me, as crickets are more common in grassy areas away from the concrete. After a few days, there were so many crickets in the downtown area that the first couple of floors of the buildings had taken on their black color. Which meant that crickets were literally crawling everywhere, or flying around in some cases. If you had entomophobia (that’s the scientific name for fear of bugs), you were in serious trouble.

After a week or so, I had to hire a guy to come to my store every day to pick up dead crickets. I’m not kidding — that’s all the guy did all day long as he went from one retail store to another, gathering the dead insects. They were dead because we all thought spraying an insecticide would discourage them from finding a way into our buildings. We were wrong, so the dead crickets had to be disposed of properly, and we didn’t have the manpower to spend the day picking up crickets. Dead crickets piling up on the floor wasn’t conducive to business.

All this sounds bad enough, but it got worse. In some locations your car would literally slide, and I mean slide, on dead crickets as you approached some of the stop signs. So you learned quickly to begin stopping a good bit sooner than you normally would. It was disgusting, to say the least.

The other problem I had was the number of these critters that slipped into my apartment and disturbed my sleep. I know what you’re going to say: The sound of crickets chirping helps you sleep good. Well, when the chirping reaches the decibel level of a symphony orchestra, that’s not the case. That meant I spent half the night chasing crickets that got under every piece of furniture and all the appliances I owned. Suffice it to say I didn’t get much sleep. It’s a good thing I was younger then. And it was several weeks before I finally got the last of the little devils. I don’t know how they can live so long inside a house. Don’t they have to eat?

This went on for several days before finally ending abruptly. The weather was dry for a while, which meant there were no new crickets to take the place of the ones that were dying. Finally, it was all just a matter of cleanup. That meant moving every piece of furniture in the house and sweeping or vacuuming up the cricket remains for disposal. The young lady who lived next to me just put them in a pile beside her door. I didn’t ask, but I think it was something of a trophy for her, or maybe a way to see how many of the things were in her apartment. Either way, it was a big pile of bugs. Sometime later she finally disposed of the things, I’m happy to say.

After all that, these love bugs don’t sound so bad after all, do they? As for me, I’m off to the car wash.

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