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I think all of us here are terrified of bugs…I AM!! RiversGrace (who just moved about an hour away from me-yay!) was commenting how there were SOO many bugs in Houston…I thought this was normal, but aparantly not everyone in the country gets swarmed when they step outside? lol Ive heard some randomly placed stories throughout the forum and they are always hilarious and make me giggle. I thought it would be good to condense them here.
Well I used to live in an apartment. I know they are notorious for bugs so I got some Spectracide and soaked the perimeter. Afterwards, I only saw maybe a total of 3 teeny tiny food roaches here and there-and once we had ants, but the complex called The Orkin man and he took care of the ant problem. Now that I’m in a house, I figure the bug problem would be less than the apartment…wrong -_- The house is in a very old neighborhood and there are a LOT of old trees around….which means giant tree/wood roaches. These things have their own zip code-OMG
So there’s a bunch of roaches at this house. Ive soaked it in Spectracide, and saw a HUGE reduction, but every now and then one sneaks through. I was in the kitchen recently, late one night, making food for the next day. I HEAR a scuttle on the tile, and out from under the stove crawls this 2-3 inch long mammoth roach. I can handle snakes, spiders, bats, mice etc. but roaches, I find to be the most revolting things ever. I know they’re good for the environment, blah blah, but they’re creepy and I dont want them in my kitchen!
Well my big orange cat, Chester was in the kitchen. He’s fearless! I sprayed the roach, and he started twitching around the kitchen. ALL of Chester’s attention was focused on this bug-his eyes were dinner plates! I didn’t want the cat messing with the bug because the bug now has poison on him. Chester starts pawing at this thing, and the bug gets flipped over on his back. I yell at him “CHESTER!! BACK OFF!” and swat near the cat, trying to scare him off. Nope-focused. Chester gives him another swat, and sends him shooting across the tile kitchen like a hockey puck, legs flailing everywhere! AHHHH!! I was afraid Mr. Bug-o would flip back on his little legs and take off under the stove again. This cat is having a grand ole time. OH BOY! A TOY THAT MOVES AND PLAYS BACK! yuck. I eventually disposed of the roach but watching that big fluffy cat playing olympic roach hockey with this big wood roach still cracks me up. Poor thing couldn’t understand WHY his new toy was taken away.
I like bugs . I always try to identify, photo and/or preserve anything new I find, but the one yesterday freaked me out a little!
I found this HUGE fly in my studio! I knew horse flies got big, but this one was over an inch long! Wow! Made my day.
I identified it tentatively as a female Tabanus of some kind. From what I read, they bite like the dickens.Stink bugs , moths ( I seriously freak over them ! ) Asian Ladybugs nasty little things and they bite . I like spiders and scorpians .
Waterbugs are cockroachs and as a kid my dog killed them and left them in a pile . Man I hated them .Okay, I should modify my original statement….”LOTS of us are terrfied…the rest are fascinated” 😉 I dont mind rolly-polly bugs, butterflies, dragonflies, lady bugs, and moths-but roaches and june bugs (they look like roaches) and any local beetles I find to be super creepy. There is a strange bug Ive never seen before that pops up in my bedroom sometimes…I’ll have to get a picture and send it to you, Melody. Strangely shaped, and all black.
Dragonflies are so pretty . Regular ladybugs are good bugs . Praying mantis are around here . I like worms too .
Yeah, I’m in the fascinated camp, but I do have my M.S. in Entomology. 😛
The tiny roaches are the nasty ones, those are the ones that infest everything. Yuck. I like the big ones, I think they are cool, although the husband does not agree. This may be a bad time to point this out, but did you know they can fly?
During the summer, we eat outside. Once, a bird was chasing a cicada; they flew under the umbrella. The bird flew by, afraid when it saw us, but the bug hit the support and fell into my brother’s plate.
I’d say cicadas are about 2 inches in length to give you an idea.
So we’re staring at this bug, who was slowly making its way out of the plate, covered in vinaigrette. It fell to the ground, and lo and behold, Pooka, our now departed Chinese hairless crested, sniffs at it, putting her nose close enough that the bug crawled onto it. Pooka realized, yum, this taste good, and starts to lick. And continues to lick, lick and then… slurps the bug into her mouth – a bug that’s basically the length of her muzzle!
We’re just speechless at this point. She wasn’t a dog that just ate anything, so our mouths were gaping open here! Then someone says “But the wings are hard! I that going to hurt her?”
And at that moment, she neatly spat out the two wings. They weren’t even bent or anything, I was able to clean them and give them to my mom for her class.
To this day, we don’t know if she would have eaten that bug if it hadn’t been covered in salad dressing.
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http://www.sarahjestin.com/feedbacklists.htmI like insects too. Though I admit that I wish I had an immunity to the biting ones such as mosquitos.
German roaches– those are the little ones (used to live in Houston too) do incite my rage when I see them, but even then I think I would enjoy them if they stayed in their native habitat. I guess our habitat is now their native habitat!
Still, I never see anything good coming out of manufactured insecticides and so I stay right away from them.
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My art: featherdust.comOne of the many great things about living in Alaska is we don’t have a lot of bugs! No roaches, fleas, ticks, even crickets. However, we do have mosquitoes that are about the size of pterodactyls. That may make up for some things XD
I’ve lived up here for about 10 years and this is the first time since I’ve been here that SLUGS have been hitchhiking onto my dogs’ fur when they go outside. These aren’t the yellow banana slugs I’m used to in to continental U.S. They are smaller, and grey. But still YUCKY. I usually make my husband do “slug checks” but he went to bed early one night, so I had the unfortunate duty.
My littler shih tzu comes insides, and lo and behold, two slugs tangled up in her leg fur.
I got them out with a paper towel and was unsure what to do with them. I was afraid they would crawl back up the trashcan or something. I decided to put salt on them. BAD IDEA. I saw their little eye stalks retract in their head (in what I assumed was pain) and I started freaking out.(Not too sure what I was expecting >_>) Woke up my husband, saying “I’m a monster!!” crying on how I am a terrible person and I should have just let them go like I do other bugs. At the time, I was going through pretty emotional stuff anyways and I guess that was the icing on the cake. My husband thought I was crazy, but I hate hurting anything! I was the kid who yelled at other kids for stepping on ant hills because “they worked so hard on that hill and that’s their home!!” XDWe seem to be in some kind of local hot spot for wolf spiders–you know, big, hairy, brown and tan stripes, five-inch leg span, quite fast but shy. Now I am happy to live and let live with them–having one in your house is kind of like having an eight-legged Terminator that targets nastier things like roaches and centipedes. (Don’t get me started on the local centipedes.) But I sure wish they weren’t the same color as our carpet. The other night I could have sworn a particularly large specimen was following me around. Go down the hall to the bathroom, flip on the light . . . motionless wolf spider in the middle of the floor. Detour around spider. Back up the hall to the kitchen, fix dinner, head back out to the living room . . . nearly step on wolf spider, which pulls back four legs in an “oh EEK!” gesture. Detour around spider. Fifteen minutes later in hallway, spot scurrying brown thing. At that point I stopped and informed the spider that if I found it on my pillow later, there would be a serious Incident.
I don’t generally have a problem with bugs. I love my banana slugs, I ignore just about everything else but try to avoid the ones that bite. I think that the only ones I kill are black widows, but I only see those once or twice a year, usually when cleaning the garage or moving something that’s been out in the yard too long. One of my cats loves to hunt spiders, but unless he’s being extra cruel I don’t intervene.
However, I work at a public library…and after three special little bug incidents I can be very nervous about checking in DVDs.
To check in returned library items, we have to make sure all the pieces are accounted for and the item is in the same shape in which it left the library. So for DVDs, you open the case and check the disc. Yeah….one night, I’m on the last hour check in desk so it’s like 8:30, I’m the only one in the back workroom, and I pop open a DVD case and magically I’m across the room in my wheely chair. It takes a minute for me to process what the hell freaked me out so much. I had seen movement in the DVD case, and I when I steeled my nerves and went back to investigate, there were like a half dozen little roaches swarming out of the case and climbing all the desk and keyboard. One of the hard core Southern ladies squished em all for me, cause except for like giant hissing cockroach pets, I’d never frickin seen a cockroach in real life. We charged the person who returned that DVD a cleaning fee =P
I’ve been at this library for almost four years, and I have had three live roach incidents all coming out of DVD cases (different patrons returning the items too, yuck), and one case of mites. My library fellows have also had roach incidents, and once, a freaky looking yellow spider crawled out of a DVD case. But since it wasn’t a roach we put him outside. I feel like we should have a sign or statement on the library card application form alerting patrons to the fact that the library doesn’t want their bugs and they will be fined for returning them with our materials.
So I guess I should amend my previous statement, I don’t mind bugs as long as they don’t surprise me at work.
hate bugs other than pillbugs….
I hated my old office because it had random roaches that always thought climbing on my shirt sleeve and scaring the bejeebus out of me was the thing to do….
as far as spiders go, hate and will kill all…. when I was still living at home back when I was a kid and teenager, we had I think it was some escapees but they were very large tarantulas….my first discovery was when I was little kid looking for pillbugs like I did each day I didn’t have anything better to do, I lifted up a big piece of wood and there it was…I screamed and tried to kill it but I guess I didn’t have enough weight to do it and it skittered around for what seemed like ages until I killed it finally…later as a teen I decided to curl up for a nap on the couch, for some reason, I decided to flip over a pillow there and here’s one again, I ended up screaming and eventually sucking it up with the vaccuum….a few weeks later, I go to vaccuum and there’s another one hiding under it, I know it’s not the same one since it was way toooo big to get back out so down it got sucked up as well….
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4. September Raffle Prize 2022 AHD Male GriffinReading this thread makes me glad I live as far north as I do. I think the largest bug I’ve seen is about the size of the end of you thumb and it’s usually a bee or wasp. The winters here probably keep the bugs from getting very big. And as far as I know we don’t have roaches here(or not many if we do).
Here’s a fun fact for everyone.
Those “potato/pill/roley poley” bugs that most of us played with at children, are actually not bugs at all, but one of the worlds tiniest crustaceans.
Here’s a fun fact for everyone.
Those “potato/pill/roley poley” bugs that most of us played with at children, are actually not bugs at all, but one of the worlds tiniest crustaceans.
I adore pillbugs, and when I was a little kid, I thought they were trilobites that the grown-ups failed to notice! 🙂
I’m also glad I live in Minnesota where the winters keep the bug populace under control. I’m not scared of them persay, but I really dislike spiderwebs and dead bugs in my home. (And I don’t like using insecticides either.)
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