Okay I know this is going to freak a lot of you out and make
you vow to never come to north Florida, but that said, I still have to write
about nuisance bugs! Because FL is full of bugs of ALL kinds and I would be remiss if I
didn’t tell the truth. No, they are not a favorite thing that I love about FL. You
know that song, “I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes”? Well, neither do I, but
being born and raised here, I guess I’ve developed a certain tolerance for
(most of) the little beasties. Throughout my life I have seen the cycle of life
and how important some insects are to OUR lives, how they help make our entire world
habitable. Try living without ants and bees and beetles and flies and even mosquitoes,
and you’ll soon wish them back. Just to give a few examples, bees make honey
and pollinate, which gives us yummy things to eat, flies and beetles eat dead
things, ants aerate the ground and are on clean up duty as well.
And mosquitoes? Their larvae are a mainstay
for fish and other kinds of aquatic animals to munch down on. Spiders are in
charge of insect population control.
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| Deer fly |
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| Horse fly |
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| Scorpion, makes me cringe to look at it! |
I won’t go into the real nuisances; roaches (big or little),or silverfish, or
palmetto bugs, or praying mantis’, or stink bugs, or the ones that hurt, like scorpions,
horse flies (big stingers), deer flies (little, fast, stinging and yellow),
black flies (also fast little stingers), or wasps or hornets, or chiggers or “No-see-ums,”
because I think the only benefit to any of those is that they are someone else’s
food!
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| LB Damage to vehicle |
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| "Love Bug" |
The one bug that stands out as king among useless insects is
the so called “Love Bug,” which—to University of Florida’s undying shame—was
man-made and a total, complete, all-encompassing disaster! Bred to eat mosquitoes/larvae,
they not only don’t, but they breed incessantly during their “season,” kill all
vehicle paint jobs, plaster windshields with cement, make walking out your back
door a “batting” experience. Their only saving grace (if they have one) is that
they are mindless and slow and do not sting!
