Spending time outdoors means spending time with bugs. Some are irritating, like flies and gnats. Many want your blood, like ticks and mosquitoes. Others are entertaining, like water striders, dragon flies, red ants and beetles. And some are best avoided, like hornets, fire ants, wasps and yellow jackets. Spiders seemed to fit in all four groups.
I have always enjoyed watching bugs, even the painful ones. A hornet started building a nest over the door at the bus garage in Pike County one spring and we watched it as it added a few layers, laid some eggs and then made the nest bigger with the help of her offspring. We got rid of it when it was about the size of a baseball – somebody finally got stung.
When I was young there was a big red ant bed in the ditch in front of my house. Every summer they were there, and I helped around the house by swatting flies, then took them out to my “pet” ants. I could sit at the nest and watch them as they carried my fly offering into the hole, and they never stung me. I often had them crawling over my bare feet and legs but for some reason they never bit me.
I always enjoyed watching them move grain by grain of sand to make their home bigger. That made me really realize what “Busy and an ant” meant. It also made me realize how strong they were, often toting things bigger then they were. And it was surprising how they would work together at times to move a object too big for one to handle.
Wasps often played an important part of fishing trips. We would kill the adults and put the nest into a paper bag. At the fishing hole the little larvae in the nest holes were great bait. We learned fast that you better keep the nest cool between trips or you would have a paper bag full of very mad adult wasps the next time you went fishing.
I remember getting stung a few times getting the nests, but usually we were able to spray the nest at night and kill all the adults, then get the nest. I have heard people also dug up yellow jacket nests and used the larvae for bait, but I never knew about that while growing up.
Watching dragon flies around water was always fascinating to me. I always wished I could fly like the darting glimmers of color that would buzz around catching mosquitoes then light on waterside plants. It was years before I learned what the dragon flies were doing when they would fly over the water and touch the surface. I thought they were getting a drink, I never realized it was the female laying her eggs.
I also wanted to be able to scoot along on the surface of the water like water striders could do. We always called them water “spiders” because of the way they looked. They could skate along with no effort, never sinking into the water. And water bugs or water boatmen were the same, running circles around me as I fished in a boat or while wading. I could not figure how they could stay on top like that.
Spiders always horrified me but I could not help watching them. The big yellow and black garden spiders that spun huge webs late in the summer were scary to me, but their webs, glistening with dew in the early morning, were beautiful.
One of my worst experiences with a spider happened when I was running trotlines at Clark’s Hill. I went into a willow tree to get the end of the line, and I felt something on my ear. When the light was flashed on it, whatever it was went down into my ear. I could feel it scrabbling around on my ear drum and it made me want to scream!
Back at the camp the bug would not come out. My mom finally poured some baby oil into my ear, and a small brown spider popped out. It had taken refuge from the light in the nearest dark hole it could find – my ear! I hope that never happens again.
Wasp often scared me at night when I got to close to a nest in a bush while tying lines for catfish. I found out they would not fly at night in the dark, and I was safe as long as I turned off the light and backed away pretty fast.
Now it a great time to watch bugs. Just don’t give them too much of your blood.