I assume that Millie ate something disagreeable for her at the July 1st party as she hasn't felt well the last two nights. She had to go outside in the middle of the night, and I stood on the porch watching her. An amazing firefly was out - it was making streaks in the night - like a tiny shooting star. I'd never seen streaking fireflies before. It got me considering how our summer is so active.
It is bug time. There are great bugs, ok bugs, irritating bugs and terrible ones - that would be ticks. And that's just a human view. Plants must have a more extreme reaction to the bugs that take care of them vs the bugs that eat them.
I was watching the fly on the kitchen counter and there's all that foot rubbing that they do. House flies taste with their feet, which are millions of times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue. House flies also generally stay within one mile of where they were born. Darn! They keep coming back into the house.
But house flies are small things, just irritants. I was thinking about all the bugs that are in cottage country. That brought up dock spiders. There is a video of a gigantic dock spider being hand fed. The spider's name is Larry. It isn't "hand feeding" actually, but a stick is used to feed it a grasshopper, and then a fly on a stick, and then another. And so on. Larry likes to eat and it is bigger than the signal reflectors on the dock. Here it is in its own video.
One becomes aware of how many bugs there are in cottage country. There seem to be more of more varieties - horse flies (the biggest), deer flies, moose flies, mosquitoes everywhere. Itchy! That's one of the cottage country experiences.
So it seems to me that we are lucky in Niagara to have some insects and not a lot. I'll take the Monarch butterfly in the front garden yesterday. It was flying around the Milkweed plants. If we had a true Carolinian climate here, there would be many more bugs and mosquitoes. I read that the early settlers did a lot of clearing of the land to get rid of all the bugs. It worked.
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