THE OLD HOUSE DOCTOR 6-10-11

FUCKING BUGS AND WHY YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY TO KILL THEM

OR FOR YOU MORE TIMID SORTS,

KNOW YOUR BUGS, THEN KILL THEM

According to Doctor E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, there are over ten quintillion insects in the world, give or take a few billion. And I’ll bet there are some pissing you off right now. So I’m going to write about what you can do about them.

I don’t mean building ant farms or hiring them to pull little wagons; I mean how to recognize and get rid of them. Notice I didn’t say ‘how to preserve them.’ This isn’t “Wild Kingdom.” And I don’t much like dealing with formaldehyde myself. Preservation, indeed. We are not children here.

Now, don’t all you entomological types get up on your soapboxes. Oh, okay, go ahead; you’ve nothing else to do, being entomologists, and you look so silly up there. I could use the entertainment.

I do not condone killing bugs wholesale; there are undoubtedly many services they perform, other than making my idiot of a neighbor scream in pain when he steps on a stinging one. THAT’S sometimes worth it. But most are just plain impossible to live with. Bugs, not neighbors. Though in his case…

Take spiders. Yes, I know they’re not technically bugs. They’re not even arthropods, they’re arachnids. But just get one crawling on you in your sleep and see if you care.

The only two spiders you should care about are the black widow and the brown recluse. Both can hurt you, and the black widow can kill you outright.

Black widows love darkness and wet. I most often find them in the water meter enclosure, and they are so beautiful that I hate to kill them, but I usually do. I don’t want a meter reader or plumber or homeowner to open the meter box and have a fourteen inch spider grab their faces and suck them dry.

Actually, black widows seldom grow to more than three quarters of an inch across. They are shy, gloss black, hairless, and play the piano quite well, thank you. The females have a bright red hourglass shape on the underside of their abdomens to identify them as extremely poisonous. Isn’t that handy? Either Mother Nature or God has a sick sense of humor when you have to turn over the most dangerous spider in this hemisphere to identify it.

Okay, if it’s shiny, black and slick, kill it or leave it alone.

The brown recluse, on the other hand, is much more common. There are hundreds in your house right now.

Here is a picture of one. If you see it, kill it.

  They are low to the ground, splayed-out-looking, light tan to dark brown, hairless, and look more like crabs than spiders. Though they tell you there is a violin shape on their backs (there is), their thoraxes are so tiny that by the time you identify the mark the damn thing has jumped into your blouse. That’s a lie; they don’t jump. They will crawl into your bed, though.

The recluse bite tends to rot your skin and muscle adjacent to the bite, leaving a huge, seeping, stinking wound that will eventually heal after depriving you of muscle tissue and a social life. They hide in linens, shoes, and anywhere they can spin their messy little webs. Vacuum around and under the bed and in the window sills. They are scavengers as well as live feeders.

Kill them. I mean it.

All other spiders should be left alone. They kill all those bugs you hate and are no threat to you. As a bonus, if you kill one, the spider God Ulthalla will sneak into your room at night and relieve you of your insides. It’s not pretty.

Cockroaches have been on this planet for longer than most species; they go back to the Silurian, when frogs were the size of Volkswagens and everything was swamp. Come to think of it, things haven’t changed all that much in Arkansas.

There are two types of cockroaches in my estimation; little ones and big ones. Oh, I hear the entomologists moaning again. Somebody feed them some grubs or mealworms.

The big ones show up one at a time, and the uneducated among you (The Majority) call them Water Bugs or Palmetto Bugs. This is a lie, people. They are cockroaches. GIANT cockroaches. They crawl through spaces air can’t even penetrate and they leave disgusting roach slime all over your food. If you manage to smack one with a flyswatter, they just look at you. Then they fly up in the air, land on the back of your neck, and crawl down your shirt.

Don’t think you’ve got ‘em? Look in your food pantry and under your sink. If you see tiny black round specks the size of tiny poppyseeds, you have them. This is their offal, their ordure.

These roaches are normally absent in the winter, but as soon as the spring rains come, they come a-callin’. Then they come around again when the weather turns hot and dry, because they are attracted to water.

Forget traps. Use a chemical spray under your sink  and along the paths upon which they travel. Ortho’s Home Defense is a good one; it comes in a large container with a pump-up handle and will pretty much banish the buggers. Spray baseboards, kickplates under cabinets, and under the fridge. Keep your sink cabinet clean and dry, spray there, and they will go elsewhere.

Little roaches, however, are difficult to exterminate. These are the half-to-three quarter inch variety, and they come out in numbers. You have them because you inherited them from a filthy individual or they hitched a ride home from another filthy individual. If you leave dirty dishes around, if you leave your trash to fester, they will come. And they are a nightmare to eliminate. I suggest the same chemicals and to clean up your act. Do NOT bring home paper bags or liquor boxes; they love the taste of glue and will be happy to relocate and then breed.

Let’s talk about the flea.

You can’t crush them, because they’ll just laugh and bounce away. They can jump the equivalent of you leaping a twelve-story building. They suck blood and killed most of Europe in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

If you have them, they likely came from pets. Treat your pet with one of the chemicals that sterilize the females (Advantage and Revolution are two), and they will begin to die. It just takes a few drops placed between your pet’s shoulders to start the killing, then do it once a month.

If you have an infestation, get rid of your rug; that’s where they incubate. Sorry, it’s unlikely you can clean it of eggs. Remove all your cushions, take them outside, and vacuum your furniture. Vacuum the house BIGTIME. Wash your bedding and vacuum your bed, as well as the area beneath it. Go to the vet’s or the Farmer’s Association on Stagecoach Road and get VetKem or some seriously expensive spray with which to treat your cushions.

The most important thing is to keep the pets treated once a month with the sterilization drops. They will eventually go away.

Little black ants come into your kitchen and take over. What to do?

Wipe up the kool-aid and sweet stuff, go down to Besser Hardware and buy a small bottle of Terro Liquid. The ants will gather round the inch-wide pool you squeeze onto the counter (do it along their scent path), lap it up, and then they will disappear. Rinse and repeat if necessary. The stuff is very low in toxins and will do the trick.

My favorite bug (okay it’s an arachnid) is the chigger.

Small red dots the size of the point of a pin, these little boofers are the bane of humans in the summer woods of Arkansas. They live a charmed life, hanging on the edge of a blade of grass until they sense something warm-blooded walking by. Then they stretch out their tiny claws and get on your pants.

Before you can say ‘knife,’ the chigger crawls on your skin to constricted area such as your waistband or socks, where they find a pore. Then they bite     into it and secrete a substance that is both caustic and anesthetic, numbing the fact that your cell walls are dissolving. They suck up a minute amount of your protoplasm/blood/nuclei/mitochondria/farandolae (a tippo of the ol’ hat to Madeline L’Engle there), and then crawl off of your skin, dropping off into the grass to go and find a mate. Your blood helps to make many, many more chiggers.

And there’s the rub. You never get ONE chigger bite. You get fifty or a hundred. And the cell walls they infested continue to dissolve, making you itch for weeks. The common myth is that they die in your body, but that’s a lie. Nothing lives to die inside you unless it reproduces first, and chiggers just don’t play that.

Coat your constricted areas with DEET if you are going into the woods in summer, or if you want a less poisonous repellent, go online and get some Cactus Juice. Made from prickly pear extract, this crème smells like oranges, is non-greasy, and a tiny amount will keep the little boofers at bay for hours.

I haven’t even gotten to termites, mosquitoes, wasps, yellowjackets, or Sarah Palin yet! Stay tuned!

Next time; MORE bugs to kill! Summer’s just started.

Got a problem with my opinions, or, more likely, want to buy me drink? E-mail me at king.oldhousedoctor@gmail.com. I’ll be waiting.