Spring is in the air and with it brings forth tulips, daffodils, Japanese magnolia blossoms and of course, the less eagerly anticipated, native bugs. I’m new to bugs. In California, bugs are the stuff of folk lore. Oh sure, there’s the occasional old timer who remembers the spring of ’74 that brought killer bees from South America, but no one ever saw them. We read about their impending arrival but they never arrived. In Maryland, though, bugs are fodder for reality shows. Here, eat this.
For instance, Maryland is home to the rare Puritan Tiger Beetle (Cicindela puritana), which is classified as endangered. Endangered? How so? Does this mean that we won’t be finding this beetle on a Chinese food menu anytime soon? If a carpet of tiger beetles comes running towards me I can’t stomp on them or spray them with agent orange; between you and me, anything with more than two legs comes running at me, it’s going down. If it’s rare, it will become more rare.
And I have come to learn about camel crickets. Technically, they are crickets even though they look like spiders. They run like spiders. They have long hairy legs like spiders, but, unlike spiders who run in the opposite direction of any potential attacker, camel crickets jump toward their nemesis in zig zag leaps, and the freakin’ things are, on average, two terrifying inches long, which, when one is jumping towards me, is enough to send me screaming into my ever patient husband’s arms, who wonders aloud that a woman can have boiling wax poured onto her inner thighs and then have the hairs ripped out sans anesthesia could be afraid of a camel cricket. Yup. It’s a mystery all around.
Ever present to the area, we have the stink bug. I’ve never seen, nor heard of, a stink bug before finding our way to this little corner of paradise, but now we are ever so familiar with the little critters. They are called stink bugs because they stink if crushed; not quite the caliber of malodor that one comes to expect from a skunk, but enough of a stink to conjure the memory of a skunk. As luck would have it, they are yet another ‘accidental’ import from China. At least, that’s how the Chinese tell it. “So sorry”; but are they, are they really sorry? I see the bugs’ presence as the Chinese version of chemical warfare. The stink bugs seep into the home under sidings and doors, through soffits, and then hibernate until spring, when they pop up with the daffodils, scurry around the floor or fly crazily like drug addled moths around light fixtures. I keep a glue trap or two around the house to capture any bug that has the temerity to appear before me. I like to watch it wave its legs helplessly, unable to move, until it finally dies an ignoble death. “Zai jian” (good-bye in Chinese) I yell while it flails to the end. Yeah, it’s cold, but at least I’m not tearing wings off dragonflies.
Likewise, I’m told that while there are about 4500 different species of cockroaches, there are only four types in Maryland. Thankfully we haven’t seen any in this house, but four types still is four types too many. While I think about it, I’ve probably dated more than four types of cockroaches, but we’ll leave those stories for another day.
Last, we have cicadas. Cicadas appear in Maryland at varying intervals and last about six weeks. The swarms are reminiscent of the locusts, so I’m told. If I read the bible, I would probably know a lot more about swarms of locusts, but what little I do know makes me want to know less. If you like numbers you will like these little tidbits. I have learned that swarms are classified as Broods (think ‘generations’) and given a number; Brood X is the largest. Brood XIX is the only 13-year brood in Maryland. Each swarm/brood can reach billions of insects in a given area. Billions. Fortunately, it appears that we landed just in time to live long enough to never see a swarm. Brood X will swarm next in 2021 (we’ll be dead by then), whereas Brood XIX will swarm next in 2024 (even our bones will have dried out by then). Specific broods will swarm together once every 221 years. Broods X and XIX are expected to next swarm together in 2089 (the dust that was our graves will be gone by then). At least that’s one bullet that we’ve dodged and probably the only one.
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