Patti O'Shea's Blog

The other day, I’m sitting on the couch, working on copy edits and I heard this clicking sound. I know what that means–either a box elder bug or an Asian beetle is hitting the light bulb in my recessed lighting. I look up and tilt my head back, and sure enough, there he is. Of course, with the vaulted ceilings, there was no way I could reach him, so I returned to work and tried to ignore that irritating clicking.

It was later, as I was gathering things together to put into my tote bag for work the next day that I spotted the little bugger (um, no pun intended) sitting on the frame to my front door. I changed course, grabbed a paper towel from the kitchen, and went to slay the intruder. I got him easily, but as I looked down, I saw it. The box elder bug graveyard is directly inside my front door!

I was not thrilled.

There had to be somewhere between 8 and 12 of the damn things. Most of them were dead and the rest were dying. I hastened on the end for them.

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve found a dead box elder bug in my foyer, but the other times (yes, plural) I just figured they’d stuck to me as I’d come inside the house and didn’t think anything more of it. But I hadn’t opened my front door that day and I know they hadn’t been there that morning. That meant only one thing–there’s a gap in the seal of my front door and the damn things were crawling in.

Yesterday, my dad took a look, but said he couldn’t see anything. I took a look myself and I did see it. There’s a small gap–less than a quarter inch–but apparently big enough for box elders to crawl through in their death throes. This is going to be a pain until my dad can fix that for me. I so totally hate bugs.

Tags: bugs

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 09:44 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.