Looking Out: Bugging out
“Doggone it!” says my beloved wife Marsha from the kitchen.
“What?”
“Another ladybug is crawling across the window screen. How do they get inside?”
“Through the same door as the boxelder bugs, flies, stinkbugs and ants,” I say.
“Where is that door? Go find it and plug it up,” she says.
“It’s only 1/8 of an inch and the bugs keep it camouflaged. I can’t find it and even if I could, I don’t have a key.”
“That’s the third one today,” she says, knocking the bug off the screen with a dishtowel and taking one second to plan its funeral.
“Maybe we should do what my Uncle Otto did,” I say.
“Uncle Otto?” she says. “I don’t remember an uncle by that name.”
“By marriage. Third uncle, twice removed,” I say.
“Huh?” says Marsha, but articulately.
“Well, Otto and his wife Lulu lived…”
“Lulu?”
“Yup. My aunt. Sort of. Anyway, they lived in a log cabin in the woods and all kinds of bugs lived there with them. After Otto retired…”
“What did Otto do for a living?” Marsha interrupts.
“Pest control,” I say.
“Anyway, after he retired, he felt a little guilty about all the bugs he’d controlled during his long career, so he came up with a plan, starting with boxelder bugs,” I continue.
“How did he kill them?” she asks.
“He didn’t. He trained them. Every day he put out little tiny bowls of boxelder bug feed, and then when…”
“Boxelder bug feed?” Marsha says. “Where would you even get boxelder bug feed?”
“At the feed store. They really liked it too, and every one of those little critters put on weight. Their color improved, too. Robust bugs. Let me continue please.”
“Okay, but …,” says Marsha.
“As I was saying, he began to train the bugs. Each one got a little more food if they did what they were supposed to, and they got no food at all if they misbehaved. By and by, the whole lot of them began to catch on to the plan, and apparently they even taught the newcomers as well as their own babies.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Marsha mutters.
“Eventually, Otto got them all trained to go outside and sleep in the boxelder bug house he built alongside the cabin, so Lulu didn’t have to put up with them in the house. He even added a little classroom to the bug house, and that's where he continued his training sessions.”
“It took Otto months and months, but he finally trained thousands and thousands of boxelder bugs to move the couch from one side of the fireplace to the other. It was amazing. I saw it with my own eyes. Every day, they’d show up, move the couch and then chow down.”
“Sure,” says Marsha who is a born skeptic. “So how does this story end?”
“Sad to say, sadly,” I say with a sigh. “You see, Otto asked Lulu to go to the feed store and pick up more boxelder bug food one day when she was going to get her hair done. She forgot.”
“Oops,” says Marsha, getting into the spirit of the story.
“Oops indeed. The next morning, the boxelder bugs came into the house, moved the sofa, got no food for their effort, moved it back and then the little ingrates staged a mutiny. They called all the ladybugs, spiders, flies, ants and four divisions of stinkbugs. The boxelders let all of the others into the house where they still live to this day. Then they tore down the boxelder bug house and classroom.”
“Oh my!” says Marsha.
“Otto moved to Sandusky. Lulu moved to Peoria. True story.”
“Uh huh,” says Marsha.
— Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Looking Out: Bugging out
