Bugs are easy to see, hard to avoid

It's bug city out there right now.

The earth is crawling and buzzing with insects, which in early July are at their peak abundance, making them easy to see and hard to avoid.

Their omnipresence lends credence to the mind boggling 900,000 distinct species identified by scientists, with at least twice that many yet to be classified.

Insects make up about 80 percent of the world’s identified species, and they likely constitute the largest biomass among terrestrial animals, according to the Smithsonian, which estimates there are about 10 quintillion (that’s 1 followed by 19 zeros) individual insects alive at any given time.

While many insect species are both beneficial and beautiful — bees, butterflies, lightning bugs, dragon flies and damsel flies come to mind — it is probably not a coincidence that three of the 10 plagues visited upon the Egyptians in the Old Testament Book of Exodus consisted of insects: flies, gnats and locusts.

Of flies, the common house fly, while not all that destructive, annoys with the worst of them. There is something creepy about the ticklish tread of their six dirty feet across your personal skin that makes you get up to find the fly swatter. With their big compound eyes, they see you coming from any direction. Even so warned, however, that can’t move faster than the business end of a well-aimed fly swatter.

Gnats may be even more annoying than flies. With their determined effort to drink your tears and buzz in your ears, they specialize in ruining summer evenings for those inclined to sit outside.

Of course any short list of insectum non grata would be incomplete without the mosquito, whose ear buzzing may well be more fearsome than its stiletto beak. They are better at extracting human blood than most medical technicians, and they are brazen, at times almost suicidal, in their attempts to do it. Not to mention, of course, that they spread grave diseases and leave behind itchy welts.

If it were not wrong to pass judgment on creatures behaving in accordance with their evolved instincts, I would classify some species as insectum malus, irredeemably evil. Among them I would include the mosquito and the tachinid fly, whose larva devour monarch caterpillars from the inside out, and the Japanese beetle.

If Yahweh had really wanted to instill fear of Himself in the hearts of the Egyptians, He’d have plagued them with Japanese beetles.

Each year around the end of June they crawl out of the soil and strive to defoliate my garden. They are indifferent to human threats. They won’t shoo. You have to kill them. I’ve only ever seen them do two things, eat and copulate, often at the same time. With their 30- to 45-day adult life span, I can’t fault them for multi-tasking.

What to do about them is a hot topic among the members of several Facebook gardening groups on which I lurk. Some urge chemicals, which would probably be okay for roses, but I am not going to put any substance whose name ends in”cide” on the food I intend to eat. Others swear by pheromone-baited traps, which certainly catch beetles but are also criticized for attracting more than they catch.

The most popular approach — and the one I practice — is to knock or shake them from their perch into a pail of soapy water, which immobilizes them until they eventually drown. At the peak of their infestation I will kill several hundred a day, and the dumping site will stink with their rotting carcasses.

If I see one when I’m without my soapy water, I pick it off and crush it with my fingers — messy, yes; cruel, maybe; but oddly satisfying.