I could hardly believe my eyes as I stood there watching. Thousands upon thousands of the creepy, crawly striped insects swarmed my front porch. They literally poured out from under the concrete. I couldn't step on them fast enough. Legions upon legions replaced every step that killed twenty or more at one step.
"Daddy needs to get some bug spray."
Leave it to my 9 year-old granddaughter to state the obvious. I went inside and grabbed the liquid Sevin. The first shot sent hundreds scrambling. As I sprayed them on the porch, they headed for the grass. Within seconds hundreds, no, thousands came crawling out from under the concrete. As fast as I sprayed the length of our 60-foot porch, more took their place. My hand got tired of spraying. Thousands took off into the grass. I've never seen bugs move that fast. It was one of the creepiest things I ever witnessed. I thought of Moses and the locusts and the Exodus.
My sunflowers have no chance at survival now. Between the bug-eyed monster grasshoppers and these vegetable craving beetles, all my flowers and my lone tomato plant are toast. I have no illusions that tomorrow morning will reveal anything but complete destruction.
In my case the green grass immediately turned brown (similar to the hay pictured to the left), as the pests raced across the lawn trying to evade the poisonous spray of Sevin. For over an hour I sat on my porch bench, spraying and stamping, stamping and spraying. I couldn't possibly kill them all. They crawled beneath the doors and I had to spray the threshold. I took no chances because their threat to a person's skin was not a pretty sight either.
When things invade and come uninvited in droves, I'm afraid the devastation to property is beyond repair. All my gardening efforts, all that money spent on plants, soil and pots-- gone. Just watching them pour out of those spaces along my porch is the thing from which nightmares and horror films are born. When I googled them, and discovered they were blister beetles, the picture of what they could do to a human wouldn't leave my mind all day. Am hoping that writing this post will purge them from my mind, and a good night's sleep will prove to have eliminated them from my yard tomorrow. I can always hope, can't I?
