Remember being little, and how cute you thought ladybugs were, and how it was good luck to have one on your finger, and you wanted to be one for Halloween? Remember? Yeah, I remember too. I was sooooo bamboozled. I think they do that on purpose, they come across as all benign and adorable, because they know that one day they are simply TAKING OVER YOUR HOUSE.
I had seen this phenomenon once before, in the Smoky Mountains. We rented a cabin there one Mardi Gras weekend (it was amazing how many fellow Louisiana refugees I saw in Tennessee that weekend, escapees from the madness, but I digress) - and when we settled in there were literally heaps of dead ladybugs all over the cabin. There was a little sign explaining that a couple times a year the ladybugs make their way inside presumably to get warm. I don't know whether they make little ladybug love inside the house and that's why there are bazillions of them or if that many really managed to wiggle through whatever tiny openings there must have been in the cabin. The agency came and cleaned them up, so it wasn't all that big a deal, but I did find it highly unusual. I mean, in my experience insect infestations were things like locusts or cockroaches, things you already felt really good about hating. A ladybug infestation was a little ambiguous.
I have lived in Oregon three years, and not in a vastly different locale than my current one, either - we literally moved down the road, about 2 miles, to take up residence on the farm. In all my time here, no one has mentioned nor have I seen a ladybug infestation. Maybe it was just waiting for me.
So I painted my bedroom the loveliest shade of pale robin's egg blue. It is very serene. Serene is very good in a bedroom, don't you think? Shouldn't your bedroom be a place of sanctuary, full of things that lower your blood pressure at the end of a stressful day? Ahhhhhh. Well apparently my lovely blue bedroom looks like the sky and is very appealing - to BUGS. Allllll kinds of bugs. I came in one lovely day of late and went into my lovely serene sanctuary, and the pale blue walls were brown and moving. Literally, there were that many of them.
Now we all know my propensity for screaming, but I was a model of restraint here, even though I WAS instantly put in mind of a story told by a good friend in medical school. He had spent some time in some hideous tropical locale in less than 4-star accomodations, and woke in the night to the illusion that his ceiling was moving. No illusion. The ceiling was ALIVE, blanketed in tarantulas. I would have expired on the spot. SO here were my living walls, carpeted in an assortment of creatures but predominantly ladybugs. Who knew?? What do you DO about it?
My husband - well, we all know HIS propensity for solving problems with a vacuum cleaner, and that is what he did. Sucked them up in big swaths. I will confess to throwing back my covers and beating them prodigiously just in case there were any hangers-on, but the place was clean by bedtime. Next morning, still clean as a whistle. It was my morning to sleep in, which I was really enjoying, until a lot of buzzing caught my attention. Bad memories. There was a yellow jacket making the rounds of my room, and he had brought reinforcements. When I surveyed the room, I saw that sometime in the last hour (since I was last awakened by something) the ladybug infestation was on its second wave. This time, I figured - if they can come IN through the windows (no screens) they can go OUT, so I just left the windows up and hoped for the best. Amazingly, they left by dark. This is quite mysterious behavior to me, but hey, whatever works.
So the ladybugs still show up in the corners of windows and sills, but I can live with it, and figure it is self-limited. The yellow jackets are lots nastier but aren't coming inside in great numbers, and I am a REALLY good shot with a towel. You do not want to cross me while freshly out of the shower, I can HURT you with a rolled up towel. I am a thwacker par excellence.
So the infestation that is really chapping me are the FRUIT FLIES. Where the bloody hell do these things come from? I mean, I never see them outside. Ever. I do not know where they live and reproduce. But leave out a little fresh fruit, or slice some raw veggies and leave them on the counter, and out of nowhere you have CLOUDS of them. It is just beyond annoying. I have been told lots of ways to get rid of them - dishes of vinegar, wine, all sorts of things that DO NOT WORK. They are relentless. And having spent a rather long period of years in science, including research, I know that the generation time of fruit flies is like a microsecond. You blink and there are orders of magnitude more of them. NO ONE can have sex that fast.
SO I am enjoying the fruits of my farm, but unfortunately so are the bugs. If anyone knows a SUREFIRE way to get rid of the little buggers, or what I am doing wrong to get them in the first place, please do tell. My wrist is getting sore from all that thwapping.
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Oh, and just in case you need something to distract you from the notion that your dear life partner is occasionally dumb as a rock, let me put all that in a little perspective.
Remember the stump full of yellow jackets? Angry, angry yellow jackets, that my husband tried to burn out, and then tried to suck up in a shop vac?
I got a good deal on some bamboo poles at a garage sale, bought about 30 of them to use in the garden, and they are standing up against the side of the garage. Unfortunately close to the stump. Close enough that my husband was able to see them and the stump within the same field of vision and have a really idiotic idea. So, I guess he just wasn't really convinced they were gone, but that being the case it was a REALLY idiotic idea. I mean if you think they might still be in there, why would you want to poke them? WHYYY? And if you don't think they are in there, why would it occur to you to try to poke what isn't there? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO STICK A LONG BAMBOO POLE IN A STUMP FULL OF YELLOW JACKETS AND WIGGLE IT AROUND???? But. He did. And when he sort of had a lucky hit, and found the spot, and they started making some noise and flying out of there, he had the most insanely little boy oh-this-is-so-cool-I-wonder-if-they-could-really-hurt-me-oh-brother-Mom-better-never-find-out look on his face. The power of the Y chromosome.
Yup, there are still some yellow jackets in that stump. And yup, they will come after you. But that man can DANCE, I tell you, he spun and leaped right out of the way, it was rather impressive really. And no harm, no foul. But I do really wonder where our children got their supreme intelligence.
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