The Ant and the Grasshopper (and the flies and...)

Tom still carries this photo from Hawaii in his wallet



I have a love/hate relationship with insects. I even once considered becoming an entomologist.

I was in college, majoring in the –ologies: zoology, ecology, geology, dendrology, ichthyology, and entomology. I loved most of them (except ichthyology—ever dissect a thawed, past-eating stage, raw fish?). I found entomology particularly  fascinating; there are an estimated 6-10 million different species of insects on earth. All shapes and sizes and colors, adapted to all environments.

But I finally realized that most jobs for entomologists require figuring out ways to kill the very beings you spend your life studying. I switched my focus to plants.

The variety of insects still interests me. And between Woodchuck Acres and Skillet Farm, I think I’ve seen a fair portion of them. Every year seems to bring a new beetle, bug, or wasp to my attention.

My first insect revelation was at Cornell. I was working a summer job cleaning married student housing. I came from a fairly sheltered background, a home with a stay-at-home mother who gave dirt no quarter and I had never in my life seen a cockroach, alive or dead. One of the joys of that Cornell summer was opening freezer doors and having waterfalls of dead cockroaches cascade over you.

Then came a year in Hawaii. Understand, Tom and I are from the Northeast. The cockroaches I met in Ithaca were miniscule; we were flabbergasted at tropical roaches. Tom spent the year trying to kill them with Honolulu phonebooks dropped on their exoskeletons; I found 2x4’s worked better.

McDonough never lacked for entomological interest either. One year it was “friendly flies”. Large, buzzing bombers. There were so many that wash hung on the line was blackened by their bodies. They didn’t bite but persisted in flying around and around your head. Locals also called these “government flies”. Rumor was that the powers that be released them because they are natural enemies of the forest tent caterpillar. Our infestation did follow a year when the caterpillars had devastated area sugar bushes but I think the flies came on their own without government assistance.

Another year it was European hornets. Wasps and bees and hornets were common around the homestead and I generally follow a live and let live attitude, knowing them to be beneficial predators of garden pests. Until one day I opened the bedroom door to find thousands of large, colorful hornets pouring into the room through a hole in the ceiling. It was a scene out of a cheesy science fiction movie. A fully suited and armed exterminator took out two nests of the critters in the attic.

Our first day moving into our Indiana home we discovered giant--easily 2" long-- flies all over both porches. I have yet to identify them*; the internet installer called them horseflies but I’m not convinced**. These have since disappeared to be replaced for a few days by tiny flies; flies so small they found ways into the house even though we have built in screens.

Now every time we go outside to work we are surrounded by tiny, bee-like creatures. They don’t bite or even fly into your eyes or ears but land on bare skin. I was thinking sweat bees of some kind but they only have one set of wings. A little research and I discovered they are syrphid flies, commonly called hover or flower flies, supposedly great pollinators.

And I won’t even mention the carpenter ants in the pine tree, the katydid in the garage, the paper wasps in the newspaper tube, or the cicada on the clothesline.

Because I don’t want to bug my readers too much.

*Flies especially are hard to identify. Guidebook keys involve looking at the venation of their wings under magnification. Yeah, right, they HATE having their wings stared at.

**Most people I’ve talked to have a less than accurate knowledge of insects. I’ve heard references several times to “male mosquitoes”. Large, mosquito-like insects that don't sting flying out of the grass. I’m pretty sure people mean craneflies.