Learning from Bugs

Eeeyou!

That is how many people react to bugs. They’re disgusting, disease-spreading, creepy-crawly creatures. Perhaps the feeling is mutual; there is little reliable data about how insects react to humans. They may be conflicted; we are both food source and predator to them.

Insects may be completely indifferent to humans. Fact is there are a lot more of them than us. At any given time there are approximately ten quintillion, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000, ten million, million bugs on Earth. (That’s according to entomologists estimates reported on NPR; I don’t think anyone actually counted them.) 1, 2, Eeeyou!

Insects and me

No, I wasn’t one of those kids who fried ants with a magnifying glass or pulled the wings off flies. Nor did I practice ahimsa, the Hindu practice of non-harm to any living thing, which caused devotees to walk with a soft broom to sweep insects from their path lest they be unintentionally trod upon. I’ve used a fly swatter and smacked biting mosquitoes as much as anyone.

But I have had some unusual encounters with bugs that have caused me to respect them.

In Boy Scouts I earned a merit badge studying the butterfly life cycle. I wasn’t bug crazy. I chose which merit badges to pursue on aesthetic criteria. The monarch butterfly patch was cool. (So was the viper head for snake study. I know, Eeeyou!).

I always thought spider webs were gorgeous little engineering projects and watched a spider build one more than once. I remember discouraging fellow campers from breaking a big web sparkling with morning dew at Y camp. I was almost successful until our cabin counselor said “get rid of that cobweb and if you see the spider – Kill It.”

Spiders are among the bugs I like. I have been known to scoop them up and put them outside rather than smash them. These are insects that eat less agreeable insects, but I still don’t want to live with them. I have never been bitten by a spider, except maybe those little red chiggers, but I don’t want to start. I would give a Black Widow or a Wolf Spider wide berth.

Mosquitoes love me. Most anyone should love hiking with me, because my O-positive blood and ample sweat glands attract mosquitoes. I get bites and no one else gets any. I know DEET and OFF are bad for the environment, but I still use them in self-defense.

I used to think that mosquitoes had ‘no positive purpose on the Earth.” Then I learned that a single mosquito larvae purifies a pint of water a day.

I am allergic to hornet and wasp stings. Honey bees don’t seem to bother me as much, but I’m still not likely to build an apiary. When I was eleven I was trying out my new hatchet on a small scrub oak when an inch-long black and yellow hornet emerged from the base of the tree and stung me on my upper lip, right when the little indentation is. That is called the philtrum, which is a weird word to know at eleven, but when my upper lip was an inch thick and extended two inches from my face, the word kind of stuck.

The same year, a mud-dauber wasp stung me in my left shoulder and I looked like a weightlifter who only worked one arm. The wasp sting felt like someone had hit me with a ballpeen hammer.

My parents were Christian Scientists so no doctor diagnosed this allergy until I was nineteen in summer stock in Helena Montana and a cast member threw rocks at a yellow-jacket nest. This doc took one look at the five stings on my right hand and forearm and the eight inch swelling moving rapidly up my bicep and gave me a bone marrow cortisone shot through my elbow. “Stay away from those things. The venom is cumulative so each sting gets more dangerous. You don’t want the swelling to go to your heart”

I haven’t been stung since. I leave hornets and wasps alone. Occasionally one will get in the house and I will encourage him to leave. . . from a distance. As I said, Respect.

Humans are always getting rid of bugs. I visited my mother at Raytheon her first computer programming job. Her boss took me on a tour of the three story old brick shoe factory filled with hundreds of vacuum tubes. “Let’s go looking for bugs,” he said. Huge roaches still looking for shoe glue were attracted by the heat of the tubes. They crawled across contact points self-immolating, but shutting down the program. Programmers still talk about debugging.

I respect insects, even like some, but generally I don’t want to live with them. I’ve lived in cities for much of my life and have fought some epic roach battles. Victories were always short lived. Even moving wasn’t the answer as roaches lay eggs in cardboard boxes and hatch in your brand new space. Yuck. Roaches didn’t survive the Ice Age by being bashful.

I once stooped nose to nose with a millipede on my countertop in a basement apartment. “I don’t care if you live here,” I bellowed, “I just never want to see you again.” He left and didn’t come back. I don’t think he understood my words, probably just hated beer-breath.

We now have a summer war with tiny ants. My wife Billie is a merciless warrior. We wash the counters after every meal and put out those little white Combat traps the ants enter and carry poison to their nest. I am happy with the result, but tell the story of a neighbor also named Billie.

This Billie was soft hearted. “The ants work so hard.” she said. She put out sugar for the ants in little trails leading to ever larger little piles, leading away from the house. Hers was the only house on the street that didn’t have ants inside. My Billie who reminds me that “we don’t have ants either.”

What can we learn from bugs

Humans work hard not to live with insects. We learned that fleas on rats caused the Bubonic Plague. Mosquitoes carry malaria, yellow fever, and now West Nile virus. Deer ticks carry Lyme disease. Clearly, some bugs we humans should avoid.

Still the insect world has some lessons for us.

• Not just hornets hurt nor do only ticks make you sick. Insects outnumber us in the world. When one leaves its ancestral home like the Japanese Beetle in the 1960s or the Emerald Ash Borer and Spotted Lantern fly today, its natural predators aren’t there to keep it in check and it causes damage.

• Nature is a system. We are finding that killing bugs may not be best as crop pesticides are killing bees and other pollinators required for other crops to bear fruit. Humans call ourselves problem-solvers, but we find a solution and fail to think through the unintended consequences. Kill mosquito larvae, standing water grows more stagnant attracting worse “bugs.”

• Life is short. Humans say this all the time, but it is much truer for insects. Houseflies live for twenty-eight days; Mosquitoes live for fifty. A mayfly, after hibernating at the bottom of a stream in the aqua nymph stage for a year, bursts into the sun. Males live for two days, females live till they lay eggs, five minutes to a day, unless there are trout around. There’s a reason fly-fishermen love their mayfly flies. Remember the mayfly and do what you have to do, today

• Long lived bugs are often destructive. The longest lived insects eat stuff we don’t want them to eat. Termite queens live 25-100 years leading wood-house-feasts. Cicadas live17 years in the ground sucking roots of trees only to burst forth and eat everything. Buprestidae, or jewel beetles like the Emerald Ash Borer or the Japanese beetle (Chrysochroa fulgidissima) kill trees and plants for fifty years. Hopefully we humans can learn to be less destructive as we age.

• Be open to wonder. My daughter and her children raise Monarch butterflies from pupa and release them into the world. The girls excitement is contagious. I feel the same excitement when I see the jewel tone dragonflies helo-hover by a summer stream. At dusk a green light flashes in my peripheral vision, then another, and I feel joy – fireflies!

• Invest in watching a bug. It is a meditation to watch an ant carry a crumb through the grass, or a spider painstakingly swing on silk threads till an octagon appears. Once at a Bangkok Wat I was drawn to movement in a luminescent blue-purple lotus flower poking through the stones. I bent at the waist putting my face closer. Sparkling in the sunny school bus yellow center of this neon purple ring were two honeybees wrestling, splashing each other with pollen, which rose making the air dance with golden light. They tumbled over and over. . . I watched. . . time lost meaning. . . . When I raised my head – twenty minutes later – I had drawn a crowd, a circle of other humans watching me watch nature. “Bees,” I smiled and left the circle. Over my shoulder I saw some look inside the lotus. Most just walked away smiling. My wonder was the show.

Nature teaches us. If we let it. Even bugs. Eeyou!