If you read and follow my blog, you know how much I am enjoying life in the country. There is the beautiful scenery, the blissful silence, the sounds of birds singing but there are also many annoying insects.
Our first concern last summer was mosquitos. Costco had an electric mosquito trap on sale so we decided to buy one. We plugged it in where the old well had been as there was an electrical box. It sits on a cement circle on the tree side of the wildflower garden about 50ft from the house.
Every few days one of us empties it out and the birds come and have a feast. Because the machine attracts the mosquitos, they are almost non-existent near the house. Walking out around the property is another hazard altogether…you can get eaten alive without bug spray some days.
The next insect I tried to tackle was the housefly. I found a hack online that actually works. You take a jar, 500ml/1L, add water about halfway up. Stir in some sugar or honey. Add a drop or two of dish soap. Add a half an apple with cut side up. If you have one going bad, use that as it works even better. Lastly, cut the top off a plastic 1L bottle and place in the jar inverted.
We have dumped the flies out many times over the summer and just made sure the apple still sits in the water. Now that it is sufficiently rotten, nothing else is needed to attract them. They can’t figure out how to get out of the jar. You could just use the cut plastic bottle instead of a jar but we get too much wind and I wanted more weight.
Another insect that I find annoying is the horsefly. When one finds me outside, it circles and circles, sometimes painfully biting me before I get away. I kept seeing a hack for keeping horseflies away from horses. You clip a fake dragonfly onto their halter somewhere. I looked at the dollar stores here to see if I could find one but I only found fake butterflies. I searched online and discovered you can get this two pack from Canadian Tire for almost $20.
I looked at these, thought how fake they really look, and realized that I wasn’t willing to spend $20 on something that might not even work. I decided to just make one instead. I had been seeing some very big blue dragonflies in our field so I went with blue. Here is a photo I captured of a brown and blue one on the side of the house beside the one I made.
Just some crafting wire with beads strung on it. A cut pop can for the wings with a design punched in with a nail punch and then hot glued to the beads. I hot glued the whole thing onto a clothes pin and attached it to my work ball cap. The premise is that a horsefly will see the dragonfly and be scared away as dragonflies eat horseflies.
I have worn my dragonfly out while weeding a couple times for a few hours and not one horsefly came to bother me. I will need to wear it more often to completely believe that it works.
While getting a handle on the mosquitoes, houseflies and horseflies, I forgot about the wasps. Last year wasps were everywhere constantly building nests in our out buildings. We would knock nests down and find another started the next day. I don’t know if it has been the rainstorms, wildfire smoke or the winds but I hadn’t seen any wasps yet this summer.
I went out one day about two weeks ago picking rosehips just inside the tree line of our forest. I was stepping in farther off the path where the plumpest rosehips were. At some point I stepped on an old log and disturbed a wasp hive. The first stings were on my pinky finger but it wasn’t until I felt another on my arm that I knew I was in trouble. I looked up as I slapped my arm and saw a swarm of wasps above my head. I didn’t hesitate. I immediately began running out of the trees towards the house. The wasps followed for a bit, stinging me multiple times on any skin that was exposed; my arms, my hips were my shirt had come up and my ankle as one had managed to get into my big muck boots. I was running and screaming like a madman.
Once inside I grabbed two ice packs for the two spots that hurt the most. My pinky finger swelled up to two times its normal size and turned totally red.
Most of the sting sites felt better within 24 hours. The stings to my pinky still burned for about five days especially when water was run over it. I had read that when someone receives multiple stings, there is a 1 in 10 chance that the next time you get stung by a wasp, you may have an anaphylactic reaction. Good news for me then I guess…I got stung again the other day, just once, and no reaction. It was so much less painful than the last time that I just kept on doing what I was doing.
The wasp stings remind me that I am a visitor to their natural habitat and I need to be more cautious about where I tromp about.
While enjoying country living, I just have to accept that there will be bugs and do what I can to keep them at bay.
Sometimes, if they are too plentiful, I just spend the day indoors so I don’t go buggy.