On September 21st, we said good-bye to summer. Summer isn’t my favorite season, but I will miss the longer evenings and the fresh tomatoes. And the absence of stink bugs.
If you aren’t familiar with stink bugs, then send me your address. We might want to move in with you.
These adult odiferous insects are out in full force here trying to find a place to winter over. That would be fine except that large numbers of them want to winter over with us, and we aren’t having them!
I’ve learned a lot about brown marmorated stink bugs recently. For instance, these bugs were accidentally introduced into the United States in the late 1990s. I’m skeptical about the accidental part of this. I’m pretty sure this was a calculated attack to sidetrack Americans from issues of national importance by forcing us to spend huge quantities of time trying to expel these nasty creatures from our homes.
The first stink bug ever discovered in the United States was discovered right here in my home state of Pennsylvania in the city of Allentown. Allentown, once made famous by Billy Joel is now famous also for the stink bug debut in America.
The stink bug you see pictured here was just yesterday strolling along on our bedroom carpet. His strolling days are over now.
Our bedroom is in the back of our house, and during sunny Autumn afternoons the back of our house is pleasantly warm. Stink bugs love pleasantly warm places. They congregate on the pleasantly warm siding on the back of our house, and they squeeze their stinky bodies into our bedroom using who knows what openings to let themselves in. Removal of the bugs before bedtime is imperative because neither of us likes the idea of them dropping on us while we sleep, and our dog Mocha has a bug phobia stemming from “the great yellow jacket incident of 2010”.
Jack and I both have our own method for eliminating the bugs from our home. Jack squishes them in a tissue (releasing gruesome amounts of their pungent stinkiness) while I prefer to capture them in a tissue and run to the back door where I shake them free on the porch. His method seems more successful than mine so I’ve been willing to allow him to handle most of the “removals”.
A friend of mine sent me a link to stink bugs with a photo showing a couple shoveling stink bugs from their porch. After seeing that, I realize that I should not complain. But I do anyway.
The best offense in the war against stink bugs is to plug up any holes or cracks that allow access to your home. Just last week we removed our window air conditioner in our bedroom because we could tell that the stink bugs were using the AC unit as a gateway to the great indoors. Our great indoors! Yesterday we added a screen to the window as an extra layer of protection. The stink bug population is dwindling, and I hope they have given up on using our address as their winter home.
Autumn is my favorite season, and I’m not going to let a bug or even hundreds of bugs keep me from enjoying it! Before we know it, I will be saying hello to winter and good-bye to stink bugs.
What “bugs” you where you live?