Woman Versus Arthropods

 I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology, so I often think of animals, whether they are mammals or arthropods, in terms of their scientific classification. I have been at war with other mothers recently, but they have all been from the phylum Arthropoda — two insects and one spider, aka arachnids.

Yesterday, I was watering the strawberries I planted by my front door when I noticed what looked like a giant black-winged ant trying to pull dead bulb-flower leaves into the siding of my house. So I turned the water hose on the insect thing and pulled the leaves out of my siding.

I looked it up this morning. It was a Grass Carrying Wasp that builds nests in the crevices in the bark of mature trees, but it will try to do the same thing in the siding of houses. It is not aggressive and will only sting if provoked. My washing out of the crevice in my house's siding and pulling out the dead flowering bulb leaves it had pulled into the siding was not aggressive enough for the mother wasp to sting me,

A short while later, I decided to make use of a plastic tub I had placed in a corner of my garage. I noticed that under the rim of the tub, a rather large and skinny spider, the color of dead grass, had constructed a funnel web and laid several sacs of eggs in the web. I banged the tub on the concrete floor of the garage, hoping to dislodge the spider. Then I carried it outside through my living room rather than opening a garage door. I proceeded to wash the tub with my garden hose and turned it over to see the mother spider clutching the largest of her egg sacs with her two front legs while trying to escape my hose with her remaining six legs.

I simply washed her off, along with the other dirt, into the dried grass in my front yard. I scanned the grass for her, but since she was the same color as the unwatered grass of my front yard, and I only spent ten or twenty seconds looking for her, I did not see her or her precious egg sac again.

I felt kind of sad because I know what it is like to try to protect my babies from harm. She might have lived because I merely washed her off with a moderate stream of water. On the other hand, she might have made her way back to my garage with her egg sac, and I will come to regret the resulting spider infestation.

The other mother (and father) insects, I don't regret killing at all--Box Elder Bugs. A few years ago, my neighbor had an arborist remove and grind up two diseased maples from his yard. He offered us some woods chips for our yard. Last year, I discovered why his maples were diseased. My son and I found a congregation of Box Elder bugs in one of the piles of maple wood chips. We washed them down with water a few times and squashed a fair number of bugs, but took no further measures to control the bugs. In March of this year, I started noticing the Box Elder Bugs sunning themselves on the southeast side of my house. I washed them off repeatedly and killed a few.

Then, when the warmer weather arrived in June, the Box Elder bugs were everywhere, particularly where the one pile of woodchips had been. I soon discovered that Box Elder Bugs really like having sex. I find them all the time with their rears attached to each other and their faces facing away from each other. And then they have lots of tiny red babies.

First, I went after them the environmentally sensitive way--with a spray bottle of heavily diluted dish liquid. The problem is I have to spray them with dish liquid multiple times before they die. I went out every half hour to spray bugs during the warmer part of the day. I decreased their population, but not that much. Then I discovered I had some flea shampoo from my late cat. I made a dilute mixture of cat shampoo and water, and that worked like magic. A couple of weeks of spraying that cat shampoo and water mixture has drastically reduced the Box Elder Bug population. The problem is that my neighbor still has one infested maple tree by the fence next to our house. If I spray a Box Elder Bug on the fence, it literally tries to walk through a slit in the fence if I cannot kill it first. So I will have to keep spraying Box Elder Bugs for as long as I own my house.