Battle of the Bugs...

More ant bites today.  Somethings up.  The ants might have caught wind of my plans and devised their own devious little plans to bite back.  They know 'the Big Guy' is onto them, and maybe they wanna get onto the big guy.  Curiously, I think I've been bitten in my house, either in my bed or watching TV.  I did find a dead spider that could have been the couch culprit.  Or maybe the ants are finding another way in.  I've watched the dogs around the yard, brushing up against the trees and bushes, maybe the ants are hopping on the big Trojan Dog to sneak in past the poison.  Whatever it is, I seem to be the only one around here getting bitten and I'm getting annoyed. 

I have identified some of my attackers as Fire Ants, and they are the tiniest little ants ever.  Tiny angry ants that pack a really wicked venomous punch.  I've never seen them on me, I just know after the fact that I've been bitten.  I don't think I'll be wearing sandals to do my yardwork anymore.

I never did mention the bugs here in Vegas.  In particular, the cockroaches.  We laughed when we left Canada and the mosquito-land behind.  There are no mosquitos, blackflies, or any of those flying-biting insects here.  What we have are the creepy crawlies.  Cockroaches, scorpions, and the deadly Black Widow.  Haven't seen any snakes yet, but there are signs out in the hills to beware of rattlesnakes.  In our apartment complex out in Henderson, it was the cockroaches that gave us the creeps the most.  They were in abundance from May til August.  At dark you'd walk down the walkway and see their shadows scurrying to get out of your way.  Look in the grass and they're there by the hundreds.  Most were about the size of your thumb-knuckle, but they were pretty much harmless.  Our neighbor used to spray the poison around the perimeter of our ground floor apartments so anything that found its way inside was either dead or dying.  Still, there'd usually be one waiting at our front door and we'd have to shoo it away and get in quickly.  I don't think we'll have them here at the new place because we don't have grass.  Roaches like wet conditions.

These days it is the houseflies that I'm doing battle with, along with the ants.  A couple of weeks ago their population exploded and we have been inundated with the buggers ever since.  The neighbors next door have two large dogs and don't really clean up the dogshit in the backyard, so I think that's helping their population, AND making it a little disgusting when the wind drifts our way.  The dogshit is baked rock hard pretty quickly here, so its pretty easy to clean up.  I don't know why anyone would rather live with it there than pick it up but some people just live dirty.  Back at the apartment I got really fed up with people not picking up their dogpoo and one day I stuck a sign in the ground beside a large pile of it that said "Filthy Humans!  Pick up your shit!"  The sign, and the poo, were gone not long after.  These houseflies though, they just keep coming and coming.  I'm killing them by the hundreds with my trusty ol' weapon of mass destruction, the 'M-D'OR Super-Swatter', Made in Quebec.  It wasn't always a super-swatter, its been modified to become the killing machine it has.

Which brings to mind a battle I had back in Riverview at the old house with the bees.  I don't like killing bees.  They are an essential part of our ecosystem and they are an at risk species.  If we lose the bees, then our food chain will collapse.  There is nothing in nature that can do the job that the bees do for us.  But on this occasion, I was forced into making a stand.  It was an excellent spot for a nest, somewhere under the house beneath the mud room where there was no foundation.  But the bees became really pesky and took over.  We would be sitting out front on our patio and all these bees kept coming in at us.  We'd get agitated, then they'd get agitated and put the run to us.  For a while we stopped using the patio, but that wasn't right.  Something had to be done.

I sat out one day and let the bees come in to me.  They won't hurt you if you don't try to kill them, but if you try and miss then they'll attack.  I watched, and each one buzzed around a bit then made their lumbering way down to the floorboards, landed and crawled under.  I thought that was kinda strange, that the bees were going under there, so I ripped up a few boards and watched to see where they were going.  With the gap opened, the bees just hovered down into the hole, and onto a spot in the insulation where a hole was burrowed and then crawled in through the hole.

"Holy Fuck!", I thought, "there's a bees nest under my mud room!"

All sorts of things went through my head as to how to go about this.  There was probably about two and a half feet clearance under that section of the house, so not much wrigglin' space for me especially if I was trying to take out a bees nest.  I tried to convince my 12 year old Little Brother (BBBS Canada) to go under and get it, I even had my old Ghostbusters trench suit from Halloween 1998 for him to wear but he wouldn't do it.  And so I was left with a dilemna.  Rip up the floor of the mudroom?  Get the Exterminators?

What I decided upon doing was to convince the bees that this was a bad place for them to live.  I set up on the front patio with my guitar, my new swatter, and a few Pumphouse Scotch Ales and set about the killing.  After a few swats and misses and scrambles, I realized my weapon was just not up to par for the task of killing bees.  It was too whippy and I was missing the mark and making the bees angry at me.  So I went into the workshop and reinforced the swatter down the sides with the steel of two cut up coat hangers in order to make it super-stiff, all wrapped up in duct tape.  Now, my precision M-D'OR Super-Swatter was ready for killin'.  A whole new ballgame.  That day I killed a few, but not nearly enough to convince the hive to leave.  But the weapon was a deadly killin' machine now.  I was ready for battle.

Days passed and one day I noticed that just before the rain, all the bees came home.  One by one they all came in from the rain to take cover.  I wasn't killin' that day, just observing their behaviour.  I took note and watched the forecast for the next rainy day, and then I set up my ambush.

The sky grew dull and rain was neigh.  I was a little giddy even, knowing what was to come.  I took a swig from my warm Scotch Ale and waited, with my guitar over my lap and the super-swatter leaned against my thigh.  The sky started dropping and then they came, one by one, burdened by their heavy load and trying to avoid the raindrops.  The funny thing I figured out about a bee is, that if you swing and miss it the first time, the bee will veer away about 10feet as if to say "What the F...???", get its bearings and its hairy eyes fixed on its attacker, and then strike angrily back in a beeline towards its target.  This, is the folly of their nature.  I didn't always get them on the first strike, but I never missed that beeline target coming straight at me for the second swing.  I must have killed 50 bees that day, 60% of those kills were in this hostile angry beeline fashion.

My plan worked, as far as I know.  I killed whatever remained of them all summer, and their numbers were so dwindled that they did not return.

Truthfully, I do feel bad about that.  I don't like killing nature.  Especially bees.  They're a small but important part of our ecosystem that we cannot do without, and we are killing them off.  Like many other parts of our food chain, our species is destroying the fine balance of our ecosystem by sheer ambivalence and ignorance to what is happening on our planet.  A slow, collective, profitable suicide.  We tend to see ourselves as somehow on the outside of this ecological equation, that our planet is and always will be there to serve our needs.  That we are somehow exempt from being just another organism at risk because we are human.  What a dangerous idea.  Time is going to play out awfully for humanity if we don't start paying attention to what we are doing and who we elect to run our governments. 

WE are the invasive species here, not the bugs.  And if we choose not to be part of the ecological equation and continue to destroy the fine balance of our planet, then Mother Nature will most assuredly take its course to get rid of the problem.  We will lose everything, and the bugs will win.

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

•••


Plea for the Sacred Headwaters, British Columbia.

Please take a moment to read this and sign this petition.  Every name helps.

Shell Oil has a big plan, backed by the Harper government to enter the Sacred Headwaters in Northwestern British Columbia and begin drilling for oil using hydro-fracking, a destructive process that involves pumping chemicals into the ground in order to bring oil to the surface.  In a sensitive environment such as the headwaters of three major river systems, doesn't this seem a bit insane???  Doesn't the name SACRED mean anything?  That's where they will begin fracking if the Harper government is not stopped.  WE are the only thing standing in the way of this happening, so please lend your voice to this cause and let Harper know that we will not be passive bystanders to the destruction of Canada's wilderness. 

Thank you.