162,421 Asian lady beetles
Harmonia axyridis, the multi-colored Asian lady beetle, as you rarely see it–all by itself. Photo: Joshua Mayer, Creative Commons, some rights reserved
It would be nice to sing like Edith Piaf, “Je ne regrette rien,” (I regret nothing), but if it’s true, it’s only true for a few. Most of us carry some burdens that pop out at random, that are seemingly immune to forgetting. No need to get into particulars; it hardly matters what.
I was thinking about that as I emptied the vacuum cleaner reservoir of the 162,421 Asian lady beetles I vacuumed off the windows and walls of my house in the last week.
Though I now number that necessity among my regrets and will probably spend my next few lifetimes as a Venus fly trap, there was a certain similarity between their boneheaded and relentless emergence, their seemingly pointless meanderings, and the general uselessness of meditating on lapses of the past.
Regret is like a lady beetle
Where you go to look out the sunny window
they mill about; when you look at yourself
in the bathroom mirror they cluster and crawl.
Only you know what you’ve done to deserve them.So you get out the vacuum cleaner once again
and hoover them out of the cracks, pane by pane
working from south side to west, not neglecting
the ceilings, the lampshades, the doors.But already new ones emerge from the walls
out of nowhere, some bottomless reservoir.
Their stink lingers in the air. They startle you
afloat in the water glass, a tickle on the neck.So you get out the vacuum cleaner once again
and hoover them out of the cracks, pane by pane
working from south side to west, not neglecting
the ceilings, the lampshades, the doors.But already new ones emerge from the walls…
Tags: listeningpost, poetry
Great timing, Dale! I had just finished fifteen minutes of using the shop vac on the little bastards when I read it.
I love the poem. I have spiders in the bathroom, but not in such numbers. The bathtub drain is my hoover.
Very cute but useless. How in the world do you get rid of them?
What do you mean “moderation”? There is nothing immoderate in what I wrote.
Hi Andy–
First comment posted in the site by a new username always goes into a moderation queue. Once one is approved, further comments at NCPR publish without being held.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
Thanks for the Poem, Dale. It’s comforting to know I am not alone and can smile remembering your poem while I vacuum the hordes of the little buggers.
Thanks, Dale. I just hoovered a few hundred from my camp. I have even stronger pangs of regret than you or Edith Piaf. I heard that ladybugs feed on the eggs of house flies, and we have hundreds of houseflies that come out, with the lady bugs, whenever we warm the place up! Please check this rumor out – that ladybugs help control the fly population – with Kurt Steger on the next on-air consultation with him. Maybe he can assuage my guilt. Thanks.
I can SO relate! Nice poem. When our daughter-in-law was pretty new to the family, she came over one sunny spring day and found me “sucking ladybugs” (with the vacuum cleaner, that is), and thought it was a weird thing for a man to be doing. She gets it now.
What timing! As I was writing this, one landed on my neck and I had to flick it away, but its little stink remains!
Two hours every sunny day since February, 20-30 minutes on cloudy days. Will it never end? We have the Cadillac of bug sucking vacuums, the Miele with the bug tube attachment. Would not be sane if we did not have this! On Columbus Day weekend, they always return as a cloud by the thousands. House is 170 years old and cedar shingled, no hope of keeping them out. Can’t keep a light on in a bedroom to read. They get in the teapot, MY COCKTAIL GLASS! On my TV they show as extra pucks in a hockey game. The dog can’t drink his water from his dish, so he goes to the toilet, no luck, they are there as well. I care about nature and all living things, but I have drawn the line here, let them suffer, let them die, please, please, let them leave, but they wont. A very large reward for a solution!
Thankfully they are not locusts!
The US federal government has been importing and releasing so-called multicolor (really, how many colors do you see on them) Asian lady-beetles, sometimes annually, since about 1903, before there was even a US Department of Agriculture. It was not intended as a humanitarian program, though. Lady-beetle larvae feed on soft-bodied, slow-moving agriculture/ garden pests such as aphids, adelgids and thrips, and were expected to earn their keep.
No one quite understands why they became a widespread nuisance starting in the early to mid-1990s. Some contend it is part of the larger social trend away from civility. I would like to attribute their meteoric population rise to some kind of fertility App, but I doubt those things can even press the buttons on a smart phone.
Dale, You are the relentless poet even in times of such travesty. Thanks for the haha perspective