Sunday, September 6, 2009

Bugs!


It must have been the rain.

Last evening I went out on the Roadley for a Tour de Starbucks. It had cooled down quite a bit so I left the house about an hour earlier than I usually do.

Coming back home, I was banking around some lame pedestrians walking right down the middle of my lane when something smacked me in the mouth. At first I thought one of the punks had thrown something at me, but then in the dual headlights of the Roadley I saw all kinds of flying critters.

They were all over the place, they started bouncing off my face, my bare arms and legs, and I could hear them banging into my helmet and the bike. For the rest of the ride home, there were pockets of them which were so thick I had to make sure I kept my lips closed tightly to keep them from crashing into my teeth. They were swarming around my porch light when I got home.

This morning I made a morning jaunt back to the same Starbucks, and ran into a Sunday morning regular there who knows something about insects. I described them to him and he said "Sounds like termites."

"Termites?" I asked, "Not ants?"

"Termites," he explained, "Have wings about twice the size of their bodies, like you described, and their two-pair wings are all the same length while ants have a smaller wing and a larger wing on each side."

He added that after rain storms the termite drones and queens will take off to mate and then the queens will find new, drier wood places for new nests.

Interesting, it makes me happy I spent the money to have the house treated for termites just a week ago!


No comments:

Post a Comment