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MARTHA SEZ: The good mother Mrs. Earwig

MARTHA ALLEN

POSTED: July 19, 2010

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Summer is here: I just saw my first earwig of the summer. How adorable! It was on my kitchen sink. Soon all of the earwigs will be swarming up out of their underground lairs.

    They needn’t bother on my account. Like all evil things, earwigs love the dark, and I would be perfectly happy to have them stay underground forever. There, the females protect their little wiglings until after their first molt, a month or so after hatching, an uncharacteristically maternal practice in the insect world.

    So Mrs. Earwig is a good mother. Well, that’s all well and good, but I still can’t find it in my heart to forgive her and her offspring the way they look, or their wriggly slither. True, they probably don’t crawl into your ears while you sleep — although I don’t rule it out — but they do pinch people — why they’re called pinchbugs — or am I the only one who calls them that? — and they eat your flowers while you sleep. Also, they crawl into the sleeves and pant legs of clothes that are hanging on the line.

    Another bad bug that will soon appear in our summer gardens is the Japanese beetle. While not as creepy as the earwig, the Japanese beetle is a serious pest, and shameless as well.

    These are the bugs you see incessantly coupling in your roses. How they manage to eat so many leaves and flowers is beyond me, since they never seem to stop rolling lasciviously around on and among the petals.

    Japanese beetles were first discovered in the United States in a nursery near Riverton, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia. Now they are a problem everywhere in the United States.

    Once I tried dusting insecticidal powder on my roses, but it spoiled their appearance.

    “No, that’s not powdery mildew, that’s insect repellant, and you can’t see it, but under the powder is the most beautiful yellow Graham Thomas rose.”

    The next year I made a trip to the hardware store before the beetles had even morphed out of their disgusting cutworm stage. Japanese beetles damage lawns and golf courses as larvae, too. (their life cycle takes two years in colder climates). I came away with a sex lure trap.

    The trap contains two separate lures: a floral perfume for the gals, and a synthetic sex pheromone to attract the guys. I guess in nature the female Japanese beetles fly to the roses and then the males fly over because the females are there.

    While I was putting up the trap, a neighbor strolled by. I explained the principle of the thing.

    “I’ve seen them in fragrante delicto,” she allowed.

    The idea of the trap is, a scented pad on a plastic frame attracts the beetles, who blunder around in a stupor and then fall down into a plastic bag. The directions on the box advise setting up the trap at least 50 feet from the garden, upwind, as otherwise it can attract the beetles to the plants.

    I was feeling a little guilty about the whole thing. It reminded me of the false glitziness of American television, all those extreme makeovers and reality show dating competitions and Donald Trump. Why involve innocent bugs?

    As it turned out I need not have worried about corrupting the natural instincts of the Japanese beetles in my neighborhood — or those I have lured in from outlying areas, maybe from Lewis or Tupper Lake — Because I still found them rolling around inside my roses. Were there fewer? More? Hard to say.

    The trap may have been luring beetles out of my garden, but I had no way of knowing whether the bugs in the bottom of the bag had flown in under their own steam or were just ones I had picked off the roses and thrown into the trap. I really hate them.

    I have since read that attractant traps have proven more useful in finding and delineating Japanese beetle populations than in preventing damage to roses.

    A question that comes up a lot is, if I use this sex lure bait, will I be more attractive?

    The answer is yes and no. Yes, you will attract Japanese beetles of both sexes, but probably not humans, especially if you have a lot of beetles rolling around on you. Scientists need to get busy on a human pheromone perfume. Enough of this mucking around with beetle traps.

    In the meantime, have a good week.