A couple weeks ago I was eating some cereal. I had kept the open box out in the open in the kitchen probably for a couple months - I don’t eat cereal very often. This isn’t a very bug-infested part of the world (Alberta), and all we usually see in the house are a few spiders and the occasional house fly. Anyways this cereal has all kinds of nuts and flakes in it, and looks very “whole grain”. I noticed there were little black flecks mixed in the stuff, maybe 2mm long. I’d noticed them before, but assumed them to be little bits of nut skin or parts of grains. I’d eaten about half the bowl of cereal, and for some reason decided to take a closer look at the black things to see what kind of grain they were…
They had little legs… :eek:
Turns out I had a small infestation of confused flour beetles living in my cereal box. Worst thing was that over the weeks I had happily munched down two or three full bowls of cereal (and probably close to 100 bugs) before I noticed what those black things were. The new cereal box now resides in the freezer.
My other story is from when I was in Thailand for 6 weeks. There you expect vermin, since you can watch the geckos chase them all over the walls. I found out how invasive insects were, especially the little tropical ants. Here in my arid cold home I can leave a plate of food out for weeks, and all that’ll happen is it gets dried out. There if I left the crumbs from a cookie on the desk upstairs for more than 10 minutes there would be a procession of ants carrying them away. I learned to clean everything up, and not to even leave a banana peel on the table - straight to the garbage. The ants and I got along fine until one morning I woke up to an itchy arm. Ants… crawling on my arm. Pulled the thin sheet off so I could sit up and brush them off, and dicovered that there were a few hundred crawling all over me and my birthday suit. Never did find out why… they didn’t bite and I had no food in the bed. They only did it once too. I didn’t freak since I was so groggy, but I remember the incident just like in a horror movie where someone pulls back a blanket or curtain to reveal an undualting sea of disgusting bugs… ahh the flashback.