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Nov. 9th, 2017 08:53 pm It's box elder beetle season.
What, pray tell, is that you ask.
Well, there are a great number of box elder trees that surround my house. Technically it's a type of maple, but try to imagine if a maple was, in fact, a fast growing weed that's nearly impossible to kill. It's also pretty useless and burns horribly. That's box elder.
The box elder beetle is red and black and eats primarily box elder. It is supposed to hibernate through the winter. However, when the weather turns cool, it will seek out any place warm, like a house. At it's worst, we'll have a few hundred on our door and several thousand hanging on to the house as a whole. It was at its worst just a couple of weeks ago. We had to keep a broom by the door to sweep them off the door to get into the house. Now that we've hit some truly cool nights, some have flown away while others either dropped dead or went into hibernation. Either way, I swept them away because who wants piles of maybe dead bugs by the door and on their deck?
Without fail numerous of these little bugs get into our house. There they fly around, into people, hang out in the window, get burned by the stove, drown in the sink and, on occasion, become prey to one of our cats. The bulk of them however, die of starvation because we happened to have a unreasonable lack of box elder trees growing in our house. This means that there's often dead box elder beetles everywhere, to go along with the live ones flying around. I've taken to vacuuming them regardless of whether or not they're living because they're going to be dead soon anyway.
At least they don't bite.
What, pray tell, is that you ask.
Well, there are a great number of box elder trees that surround my house. Technically it's a type of maple, but try to imagine if a maple was, in fact, a fast growing weed that's nearly impossible to kill. It's also pretty useless and burns horribly. That's box elder.
The box elder beetle is red and black and eats primarily box elder. It is supposed to hibernate through the winter. However, when the weather turns cool, it will seek out any place warm, like a house. At it's worst, we'll have a few hundred on our door and several thousand hanging on to the house as a whole. It was at its worst just a couple of weeks ago. We had to keep a broom by the door to sweep them off the door to get into the house. Now that we've hit some truly cool nights, some have flown away while others either dropped dead or went into hibernation. Either way, I swept them away because who wants piles of maybe dead bugs by the door and on their deck?
Without fail numerous of these little bugs get into our house. There they fly around, into people, hang out in the window, get burned by the stove, drown in the sink and, on occasion, become prey to one of our cats. The bulk of them however, die of starvation because we happened to have a unreasonable lack of box elder trees growing in our house. This means that there's often dead box elder beetles everywhere, to go along with the live ones flying around. I've taken to vacuuming them regardless of whether or not they're living because they're going to be dead soon anyway.
At least they don't bite.
