I am not sure why I have been selected to be bother by bugs so much this fall, but my guess is the abundance of time that I am spending outdoors. I did another post about how much yellow jackets were getting on my nerves due to their resilience, but there is another bug that is my least favorite of 2012.
What is it?
It is most definitely the Boxelder bug. It beats out ones that eat things in my garden, ones that sting, even more creepy crawly ones, simply because of the amount of these bugs I have seen and their tendency to be attracted to me. At one point in the last week, I had 7 of these stuck to the side window of my car and there was another swarm of them flying around.
Why don’t I like them?
I do not like how many of them there are, and that they do look like they are capable of biting or eating my plants. I know that they don’t really do any damage and haven’t even made it into the house or anything else, but they do look unappealing enough especially in masses that they are the bad bug of 2012.
Have you seen an usually large number of these this year? Is it due to the drought like conditions or something else?
When I was a kid in the early 90′s I remember them crawling into our screens, getting in the house all over the place. Literally hundreds of them would be on the screens to our windows. They seemed to be able to squeeze through anything. But certainly more wet seasons prevent/retard their population. Only in dry years do they seem to flourish.