A lot of people like summer. They want the heat, they want to wear as little in the way of clothes as possible and they want to go to the beach. They enjoy working in the garden, harvesting their vegetables and cutting flowers.
I do that, too, but I do not like summer. I do not like heat and humidity, I stay covered to avoid skin cancer and, after once nearly drowning in a pond, I stay away from the water unless it is to stand on the shore and look for seabirds on or over it.
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| A fungal gnat that crawled through the screen but could not get through the glass on the back door. (Margo D. Beller) |
Also, I don't like most insects, especially the biting kind. When I went to Troy Meadows the other week, during the waning spring migration time, I was set upon by black flies as I tried to step carefully around lakes of muddy water in the middle of the main, unpaved road. This week was no better at Great Swamp, when I took a friend there on her day off. When we weren't roasting in the sun we were waving away insects in the shade.
And I'm not even talking about mosquitos, the unofficial state bird of New Jersey. After all the rain we've had the mosquito eggs should be hatching just about now and the young will be hungry.
But what I especially do not like is when certain insects make their way onto my enclosed porch, where I sit in my chair with my coffee and enjoy the breeze (including from a fan) without worrying about being bitten - unless something gets inside.
Mosquitos that get in are caught and killed. Large flies are shown an open door and encouraged to leave. Spiders are left alone because their webs catch the smaller bugs. Lady bugs are put outside where they can eat the aphids that bother some of my flowers. But the black blister beetle, which unlike the many other types of beetles in this state I find on the porch, are removed in one way or another. No-see-ums? Well, there's not much I can do about them except keep the fan blowing on me.
And then there are the fungal gnats.
Until last August I had never heard of these flying pests. They don't bite but they do lay eggs - a lot of eggs. I would catch a gnat and put it outside. Then I'd find more. Finally, I discovered an infestation of gnats in the bag of sunflower seeds I'd been using when I had feeders out. This caused a lot of bother. I stopped releasing the gnats and turned to smashing them. I dumped soil out of the plants I had put on the porch for the summer and repotted them before taking them into the house. (I did not do this for one unwieldy plant I put outside, then took inside, then had to decide whether to kill it, then cut it down after it put out new growth from the bottom.)
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| Going to extremes last year. (Margo D. Beller) |
Finally, I turned to chemical warfare. That did the trick, but I could not sit on the porch for a week.
So imagine my dismay when, a day after putting my plants on the porch earlier this month, when it was finally warm enough to do so, I started finding gnats again. How were they getting in?
When I had bought fresh bird seed I had also bought a pail with a lid that locks, so they weren't coming from there. Any pot that had even a trace of soil in it was in a corner of the porch under a tarp. Could they be squeezing through the mesh screens where I had windows open? That was likely. I closed all the windows and took the plants back into the house after spraying them with a solution to kill any possible eggs.
There is not much more I can do now except to kill what I can reach or hope they get stuck in a spider web.
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| Last year's spiders helping me out with the gnats. (Margo D. Beller) |
Why are the gnats trying to come onto the porch, months ahead of when they infested my porch last year? Are they trying to get away from hungry birds like the house wrens? Has it been too hot or too wet for them this year? Is it global warming? We're not even in the heat of July yet.
When we had an infestation of carpenter ants in our bathroom in 2022, which I wrote about in September, that had been a particularly dry season and the ants were looking for water. This year we've had plenty of water, maybe too much so, and twice I've caught an ant in the bathroom. My husband has put out poisoned bait and we've had no problems since then.
With the plants safely inside I didn't feel the need to nuke the porch again. But when one of the gnats somehow came inside the house and into my den the other night I went nuclear, making sure the den doors were closed so I could kill it before it could go to where I keep the plants. I thought I was successful but a night later what I hope was the same one flew across the room, attracted by the lights. This one I know I caught, with a well-aimed paperback book. But I'll be spraying the plants and using yellow sticky tape for the rest of the summer.
How did the gnat, or gnats, get into the house? Probably hitched a ride on me. I'll have to be vigilant about that now, too.
