Three years ago, the ladybugs invaded. It had
been a mild winter, and I was surprised to see an occasional helmet-shaped bug
slowly crawling along the windowsill in the bedroom or on the counter top in the
kitchen. These rooms are on the west side of the house and receive the afternoon
sun.
The orange color on their backs
was pale and not nearly as bright as I had seen during the summer months when I
would spot one occasionally in the garden. And they certainly were not as bright
as the decorative ones I had seen on jewelry and other ornaments,
I listened with heightened
interest when I heard Denny on his Sunday morning garden show telling a caller
to catch the ladybugs and release them outside. They are what Denny calls a
“good bug” in that they provide benefit to the gardener by controlling
other, less desirable insects. I followed his advice at first, catching the
ladybug with my hand, opening the window and setting it free. At first, I felt a
little sorry for my black-spotted friend when sending it from the nice warm
bedroom to the cold driveway at the back of my house.
After a few weeks of this, my
patience started to grow thin, especially when I woke up one Sunday morning and
found one in crawling on me in bed. That afternoon, I decided to look for the
source. Maybe they were coming in through some opening in the house. When I
removed the windows from the up and downstairs, I found lots of ladybugs,
sometimes 10 – 15 in a window channel.
This was not a time of the
careful retrieval of ladybugs and their release back to nature. Instead, I got
the Dustbuster and sucked them into
its bag to never be seen again. After all they had violated my most sacred
space, my bed. What if I were sleeping and just so happen to have my mouth open
and they decided to choose a warm, moist place to have their picnic that
morning. Aargh!
When summer approached, we saw
no more ladybugs in the house. We did discover their little cemeteries however
when we cleaned the ceiling light fixtures.
Last year, there were few of them and they were hardly noticeable. But this year seems to bringing us record numbers. I don’t like it, but it seems there’s not much I can do. When friends come over and see little critters moving about in the kitchen, I try to explain the ladybug phenomenon and how they are considered a “good bug”. I keep the Dustbuster thing to myself -- I don't want to hear their criticism of my inhumanity towards bugs.
April 2001, Carl H.