I had totally forgotten that they thrive on the soybean aphid. Oy. No wonder I’m still seeing quite a few - the farmers around here have been harvesting the beans like mad while it has been dry. Thankfully, the fields nearest to the house are corn.
Neither my cats nor my dogs will eat the things, and I don’t blame them. But what do I know? My dogs like to snack out of the free buffet - aka the litter box - and roll in all type of ghastly goodness. Oh, and they like to haul stalks of corn out of the field up to the house and eat the corn off of the cob.
Box elders are my personal nemeses. I love how I can’t open any doors or windows during some parts of the year without those red little bastards swarming in. It’s like they think the entire of my apartment is some kind of insect Valhalla or something, like hanging out inside and then getting captured and killed by me is some kind of badge of honor…
Still better than tent caterpillars, though. shudder
Are they always around or are they cyclical? I’ve only seen them once, when we lived in Seattle. Mom had them in her plum tree one summer. Haven’t seen them in Iowa at all.
There’s one insect thing that’s just beautiful. It happens in the fall, with spiders. I don’t always see it because it happens early in the day. The top of the grass gets covered in silky webs. It looks like someone covered your yard with angel hair. The stuff is gone by the time the sun is up and the dew is gone. But it’s gorgeous.
I thought the “box elders” in the OP were trees also. After seeing the picture that Hal Briston provided, I recognized them as “f*ck bugs”, or “love bugs”, (more of the former and not so much of the latter), because that’s what they do all day long, in orgy clusters all over the front of the house.
You know, I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure they come into season yearly, but some seasons are (much) worse than others.
There was one year in the Upper Peninsula they were so bad, you could drive down the road, stop your car and THE ROAD WAS STILL MOVING. When you started rolling forward again, you could hear them bursting under your tires like popcorn.
Maybe I should’ve put that last paragraph in spoiler tags.
Mom’s fuzzies moved from the plum tree to the garage roof. We had to climb up to the roof and cut branches off the tree, and then we burned the branches. Good times.
Mom said you could be fined for not dealing with the caterpillars on your property.
