I am living in the Land of the Ants a-goddamn-gain, which is certainly a joy and a treat. What's the worst bug invasion you ever had?

-- Kymm Zuckert (hedgehog@hedgehog.net), August 02, 2000

Answers

This year we have the worst invasion of carpenter ants I've ever seen.They're eating my house frame not to mention leaving their cigarette butts and beer cans all over. I'm also having a problem with mutant centipedes,those bad boys are 2 or 3 inches long. I went to make my bed the other night, flipped my sheets back, and a huge one went flinging across the room. What if I would have just gotten into bed? The horror....

-- Amy T. (als918@aol.com), August 02, 2000.

When I was in college I lived in a studio apartment in a bldg. that included several less-than-sanitary old drunks. This meant that the bldg. had a pretty serious cockroach problem. Now I come from Louisiana, where it doesn't matter how clean your house is, there will be cockroaches in it. In this apartment, however, no matter how much boric acid I scattered, they were omnipresent. And they would set off the smoke alarm, which was horrible.

The worst invasion, however, was by the exterminators, whose week-in- advance announcement that they were coming I ignored with all the blithe unconcern of an undergraduate. There they were, beating on my door in the Middle of the Night (8AM) with the news that I had to move all my belongings into the center of the room, cover them, and leave the building until 5 PM (!). I do not know how I managed to do it, but when I read my horoscope that day, it said something about domestic upheaval. I've believed in astrology ever since.

/Robert

-- Robert (rbdimmick@earthlink.net), August 02, 2000.

When I was a kid and living in Managua the tropical seasons were marked by various bug population explosion/migrations. There was fly season, scorpion season, butterfly season, ant season, ect.

The most amazing was Giant Rhinoceros Beetle season. The things were huge, iridescent green, with a giant proboscis - which gave them their name. Once a year they would all leave their trees and move to other locations to mate or do whatever it is they did.

They were at the upper border of the size possible for a flying insect, and would fight to stay at an altitude of three feet or so. Lumbering through the air, making a tremendous buzz - sounding like a Flash Gordon Spaceship - my brother would take delight in kicking them as they went by.

People in the States were fascinated by these and I'd catch them and work with someone else, one to hold the bug down, one to inject 'em with formaldehyde to kill 'em and preserve 'em (don't get on me for being cruel - these were insects).

Sort of makes the Texas Cricket Explosions we've been dealing with look a little tame.

Bill

-- Bill Chance (chancew1@aol.com), August 02, 2000.

My old place was the Empire of the Ants. The invasion started in spring and lasted most of the summer. They were everywhere. I used ant baits, and those worked okay.

When I was in school, I lived over the dining hall kitchen one year. The bathroom was cockroach heaven. Ick.

-- Laura (windmills@diaryland.com), August 02, 2000.

In CA in the beginning of rainy season the little bitty ants would move into the house. One morning in October I woke up to find myself covered in ants. My pink bedspread was just a moving, heaving mass of brown--the ants were moving through the house into the garage and me and my bed were "in the line of march." They were up my nose and in my ears and when I opened my mouth to scream lots fell in. My mother, normally a woman of action, was so horrified she couldn't do anything for several minutes. It took hours to clean up and divert the march.

-- Karen (phgreen@uswest.net), August 03, 2000.

Who are you, Laura Ingalls Wilder? No, wait, those were grasshoppers.

-- Kymm Zuckert (kymmz1@yahoo.com), August 03, 2000.

For a while earlier this summer, I had HUGE roaches in my apartment. They would only come out in the dark, so I always turned every light on whenever I went into a room so I wouldn't step on one.

Then one morning, I found one crushed in my bed. And I never even felt it. That was the most disgusting thing that ever happened to me.

-- Catherine (catcoicrit@earthlink.net), August 03, 2000.

When I lived in Bermuda for a couple of years as a kid, we had cockroaches the size of Volkswagons, or at least 6".

This year in our apartment we've seen an increase in the number of earwigs scurrying about the place. The cats have learned that these are not edible bugs, thanks to those lovely earwig pincers. Twice Abby (big chief bug hunter) tried to pick one up in her mouth and ended up with a swollen lip for her troubles.

-- Ron Collings (dragon@crescentschool.org), August 03, 2000.

Well, I was going to talk about moths, which are fluttering out of every cupboard and closet and closed room of my house just like in movies about decrepit old houses with ancient derelicts in them...

(I'm a bit worried about this, in fact. What is going on? And what all is going to disintegrate the next time I pick it up?)

However... this is less of an invasion than a kamikaze attack... last night, as is often my custom, I went for a long walk in the early a.m. Returning, I stepped into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and as I was brushing, I felt an amorous touch on my ear. Now, anything that was going to be amorous was asleep upstairs, and so I glanced in the mirror, and saw...

A two-inch long earwig slithering up from my neck over my earlobe.

I did not yell, merely jumped about and batted at my ear a bit (not wanting to wake up the aforementioned sleeper). The earwig was no longer to be seen. However, it was no longer to be seen ANYWHERE.

I stood about a few moments, looking at the place on the wall where in my distress I had spewed an entire mouthful of toothpaste. Then something occurred to me. I ripped off my shirt, and the earwig fell out of my bosom.

Enormous. Freakin' enormous. Don't know when I've seen one that big. Yagh. I flushed the little bastard down the toilet. Hah!

I don't know. I like most bugs. But earwigs just give me the meems. I spent all last night feeling tiny phantom legs creeping affectionately over my body. I suppose, however, that I really should do something about those moths.

-- Katharine (radix@ican.net), August 03, 2000.

I live it Texas, so bugs go with the territory.

Bill mentioned the Texas Cricket Explosions, which I somehow managed to avoid in East Texas (home of the Enormous Flying Roaches) growing up. I moved to North Texas in the Fall of 1991, and around my second month here, the crickets started coming. At first, it was just odd. Then, it was creepy. Finally, at its worst, we would tuck our jeans into our socks before leaving the dorm so the crickets wouldn't jump up out pants legs. They covered the walls of the library and other buildings, on the sunny side where they could warm themselves.

One night it froze. The next morning the grounds crew were using blowers to blow the cricket carcasses into piles for disposal.

Michael Stipe once told a story about living in Copperas Cove during a Cricket Explosion when he was a teenager. Apparently nobody disposed of the piles of dead crickets, he says he can remember the smell to this day.

A year before that, when I was still in East Texas and didn't know about the crickets, we had a bizarre invasion of little tiny moths. They weren't a bother; they, too, just liked to cling to walls. After a few weeks, they were suddenly gone, and nobody thought any more about it.

Until Spring, when we started noticing green spiderwebby nests covering entire trees on campus. And then it started to rain. For days. Green webby goo started washing into the streets. People started wearing tall boots - even the large neo-hippie contingent traded their birks and moccasins for galoshes and Docs - and the sidewalks were nearly impassable, they were so slick with goo. It was gross. It got grosser. Contained within the big green nests were moth larvae, little white squirmy worms. They started falling out of the trees. Every class started with a 5-minute period for whacking larvae out of other people's hair with notebooks. Halfway through class you'd hear a little scream as someone found another one. Occasionally you'd see someone snap with a bad case of the creepy-crawlies and damn near disrobe in the student center, trying to get them all off. My parents still live there, they say it hasn't happened since 1990.

I won't even go into the roaches, spiders, fire ants, and centipedes. Or the snakes and scorpions.

-- Never (never@never.to), August 03, 2000.

Up in Goldsworthy, a no longer in existance small mining town in the Pilbara region (top bit) of Western Australia (WA), we had big big cockroaches. They had wings also, which coming from non-tropical South Australia (SA) was a bit of a shock. They'd take off around the room, and up short summer dresses, gahhhhhh. One of the reasons for wearing the large thongs we wore when we lived there, thongs being called flip-flops over here, I think, not the bum-dentalflossundies, but the plastic footwear, these ones were like platform shoe versions of the normal thongs. They squished these bugs like nothing else did. These were the mutant cockroaches I could imagine surving a nuclear holocaust, they had a particular taste for chewing through tupperware and coming up at you through the shower drain. Made the frogs that lived in the toilet seem positively huggy, really.

-- Amanda Page (amanda@amandasprecipice.com), August 03, 2000.

Between Rob R-H with his spiders and this insect thread, I've not only been put off my lunch, I also have a terrible case of the itchies. Thank you very much.

And I thought the roaches in Pensacola and San Diego were bad. Unfortunately, the naval housing my family lived in down San Diego way was constructed on a big roach hill, or so it seemed, and it took at least five years after moving up to L.A. before we finally got them all out of the furniture. They were nasty little buggers, but not as bad as the huge tropical roaches in Pensacola. The tropical guys weren't as plentiful, but who wants to face down a single roach almost 5 inches long? Not I.

I think I'm going to run home and take a shower. *shiver*

-- Carol (webgal@ordinarygoddess.com), August 03, 2000.

Sorry about the ants, Kymm. And thanks for the mention in your entry but, what, no link?

Did you ever try the grits? Did they work?

-- Michael (mwalsh@lynx.neu.edu), August 16, 2000.