Posted on 12/06/2016 7:38:53 AM PST by DUMBGRUNT
There are two seasons here in West Texas. Insect season and winter. The insects are all pretty much gone here now. Saw one last cricket struggle to get into the shop yesterday. He was looking for some global warming. Lots of insects this summer because of the rain. Birds are fat.
Food grade diatomaceous earth kills them. Great gardening tool or household use. Ants and other insects do not build up an immunity because it works mechanically.
Swimming pool grade DE is hazardous.
I was bit by Acrobat ants while visiting a relative in Texas. The ants with the heart shaped abdomen. Those bites weren’t any fun. They left nasty red welts that burned and itched horribly. Don’t let their cute looks fool you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crematogaster
YES, people really do care about the fire ant. We abhor them. They truly do leave a blister on the skin after being bitten. The bites truly give pain. sick livestock, frogs, wounded critters - nothing is safe from fire ants. We have ‘em in Texas as bad as they had them in “The Naked Jungle”
One reason cowboys never take off their boots. They might step in a passel of fire ants.
President Trump, build that wall and hinder our invaders.
Au contraire. I’m in your area and have weird looking beetles or something marching across the porch. There’s fire ant mounds all over. Piss ants everywhere. The flies are just as bad as they were mid summer. I haven’t seen the like of spiders. I just used the broom to clean down the spider webs for Thanksgiving but it looks like a Halloween house already inside and out.
I finally turned on the heater at night just a few days ago but it’s off during the day as the furbabies come and go. Though that might change in a couple days as it’s supposed to freeze and chance of flurries. The cold won’t last long enough to slow the insects down.
Great
Rodents Damage Cars By Chewing Electrical Connections
I've heard about soy – specifically, soy-based materials used by auto manufacturers [Japanese, ie Honda] instead of petroleum-based plastics – that turn wiring into a tasty meal. The repairs are not cheap.
Why do all those damn Yankees keep moving south.
ps
Conservative Yankees are welcome but really need to work on their accent. :)
Mosquito’s! lol
They’re real bad about moving their mound into your outside AC unit. They’ll pack up the relay so the compressor won’t kick on.
Maybe they will come out with a solid state relay for the compressor.
Sealed in kryptonite!
Interesting. Everything is dead here. No fly’s. No mosquitos. No spiders. No ants. Crickets just about gone. In this area, have to spray a defensive line of bug spray along the outer areas of the shop during summer. You probably are further south and more west than me.
Forgot about the mosquitoes. They’ve also been worse this year. The cats are still bringing in grasshoppers. We hardly ever have crickets so there’s some sort of natural boundary between here and Lampasas. Lampasas has (or used to have) biblical infestations of crickets.
Charleton Heston was in it, but he wasn’t naked like in The Planet of the Apes.
Army ants threaten his rubber plantation in Africa.
Lampasas. South and east of me. You might be in that lower elevation area of Texas that includes Houston and Dallas Fort Worth. Higher humidity than us. Definitely a different climate. Am up about 1,000 foot elevation.
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