Creepy Crawlies and Things that Buzz

There are a lot of bugs in this area of the country. 

I mean a LOT. 

And there are more bugs at this house than at our old place. 

Apparently woods equals bugs... 

especially ants... and spiders.. and other unmentionables 

(like ticks, which I'll save for another post.) 

We also have a wide assortment of mud daubers, hornets, wasps, and bees. They're all fairly harmless if you leave them alone, and they actually help control the general insect population. It can be hard to avoid them when their numbers are so high though. Just the other day my three year old somehow managed to let a wasp of some sort crawl up the sleeve of his shirt as he played in our sandbox. It stung him three times before I was able to pull his shirt off and shake it out. He was pretty miserable for about 15 minutes. 

And the buzzers can be messy. The mud daubers leave their casings on the beams of the pole barn and the purlines and rafters of the hay barn. The paper wasps leave bits of cells here and there- even on hay bales. And the wasps that somehow sneak into the attic in the fall make a mess on the floor before the windows.

They bees can also be destructive. The bore bees (also called carpenter bees) drill round little holes on the underside of wooden benches, wooden eaves, board fences, etc. They leave their tell-tale piles of sawdust underneath. And at night you can hear them gnawing in the wood. It's a bit unnerving, even if they're not particularly aggressive or threatening  At our old place we had a colony of bore bees take up residence in a split rail fence. Then one spring a pair of downy woodpeckers decided that all the bore bee larva made good food for their babies and decimated the fence because they made their way to the bee's galleries through the sides of the split rails. 

Did I mention that our closest neighbors keep honey bees? -FIVE hives! Actually, I'm all for keeping honey bees. I tried to talk my husband into keeping some when we lived at our old place and had so many fruit trees. But they can be a nuisance when the weather is dry and flowers are scarce. Picnics are way out.

Someone once asked me if the mosquitoes are worse here than at our old home now that we have a pond and all. And actually, they're not as pesky here! The fish help to eat the larva I guess, and the aforementioned bug lovers must deal with the rest. AS for the rest of the insects, we get lots of frogs, newts, salamanders, bats, and bug-eating birds like barn swallows, too. 

Oh, and I should point out that there is a perk to the prevalence of insects- lightning bugs! The fire flies put on amazing shows here at certain times of the year. Hatching out of the hay field by the hundreds, they rise like newborn stars, twinkling and flashing in fantastic numbers. And later in the summer, they seem to populate the trees like blinking Christmas lights and put on awe-inspiring light shows. Amazing.