I hesitate to tell you this because you won’t want to come visit me, but we’re infested with stink bugs for probably the third straight year. We can’t get rid of them. The exterminators offer us no hope. And the problem is just getting worse. These bugs smell horrible. If you squish them or scare them they secrete a nasty odor that hovers in the air for several minutes. They like heat, and when the weather is warm they not only come out in droves but they actually start flying. They also die in prodigious numbers, leaving corpses everywhere. Vacuuming them helps, but then running the vacuum creates an Eau de Stink Bug aroma. The only good thing about them is that they don’t act like cockroaches and get into your food. The linked article says that they can decimate crops, but they tend not to bother with invading the pantry.
I’m sure at some point Finn has sampled these bugs, although I never witnessed it. He does seem to have the good sense to avoid them and not treat them as snacks. But they’re everywhere, both dead and alive. On the worst days, I have vacuumed hundreds of them off windows, shelves, the floor, grooves in the floor, laundry, curtains, screen doors, the bathroom, everywhere.
They have no natural predator and no one seems to know how to disrupt their reproductive cycle.
I hate them. I hate them, but I have definitely adjusted to them better than anyone else in our family. I no longer freak out when they land on me. Whoever figures out how to eradicate these things is going to be a billionaire, and probably win a Nobel Prize, too.
you can thank globalization for those stinkbugs, known properly as the brown marmorated stinkbug. I forget exactly which country they come from (china, taiwan, or korea), but they were introduced into the US through Allentown PA in the late 1990s. The babies, which look sort of like ladybugs, destroy anything in the broccoli family.
a few weeks back, “you bet your garden” did a piece on them. a natural predator has been found, but deployment is still in development.
My sympathies go out to you. the stinkbug is gross. I hate those fucking things for what they do to my garden. If they were in my house the way you have them, I don’t know what I’d do.
I tell you what. I don’t feel like waiting for two years. Maybe I ought to go to China and find me some of these mini-wasps.
Get a water-based vacuum. We have one, it was quite expensive but I believe that cheaper ones can be found. The vacuum pulls into water, thus all item which are airborn end up in the water. In your case, you would have very smelly water, but that is manageable.
That would be a shopvac with water in it. 100 bucks or less at the hardware joint. You’d leave the filter in, of course. I suppose you could add detergent or something to the water so the things couldn’t swim. Or you could make it smell pretty. Or just cook them up into soup — the SE Asian alternative to lemons into lemonade?
My inlaws in the NJ Philly burbs are also infested, they report, but not as dramatically as Boo.
Maybe Jesus will vacuum them up with the fundies later today. Depends how sensitive his data filters are, I suppose.
I live no more than 20 minutes from Boo(my guess and only a guess) .. but the problem is nothing like Boo has. I just use toilet paper and flush them down the toilet(the wonders of low-flush toilets!). But here it’s like a once a day thing. Not a plague like Boo has.
Don’t worry that your son may have ingested some of them lol:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389340/Stink-bug-epidemic-causes-37m-damage-fifth-apples-ru
ined.html
I’ve said the same thing. It’s like a secret Chinese weapon.
My aunt and uncle in rural West Virginia get ladybug infestations. One ladybug is cute; five hundred, not so much. The swarm on windows and walls otdoors, but some get inside, too. Creepy. And they smell bad, and leave yellow stains behind.
A friend who lives close to her found a mass of them the size of a basketball in her garden shed. gah!
I get a few ladybugs in my house, but mostly it’s boxelder bugs (which look a lot like some seed bugs). They like hanging out around the door on the south face of my house, because it can be 5-10 degrees warmer. Then they scoot around the door jamb when I go in or out.
We get them here in Chicago too, though they seem not to do any real harm. I’m told they’re another import that’s threatening to wipe out the native species. There’s an interesting citizen science project where people photograph ladybugs they find and send them over the Net to scientists so the changing species count can be tracked.
It’s not just you.. stink bugs are taking over. They used to drop, one by one, onto my wife’s desk at work, a slow drip of stinky insects with no fear.. All day. Every day.
I guess I’m grateful that all we have are cockroaches the size of plums down here. Keep your goddamn stinkbugs, BooMan.
if they’re 1 c. long, we have them here in italy too, just in less biblical abundance.
just a few everyday, and not dying everywhere in the house, no biggie…
try diatomecious (sp?) earth, sprinkled round the house, and maybe screen for windows and doors, g’luck booman!
4 years ago, we had a 30 year bat colony removed from our house in S IL. The bat guy carefully sealed every crack between the walls and the roof, installed screens on all roof vents, and so forth. He finally put the bat excluder up – a one-way door that lets bats leave but does not allow them back in.
So, the next fall, instead of 400,000 Chinese ladybugs in the attic, we had about 40. So, for you, get a caulk gun, some latex caulk which is outdoor-warranted, and seal the house as tight as possible.
I’m confused. You had bats removed and that got rid of your ladybug problem?
Yes, absolutely. The whole point is that he sealed up the junction between the walls and the roof, to keep out bats, but also it keeps out bugs. Thus, any bugs which used to sneak in thru tiny cracks no longer could get in. We also had fewer spiders, fewer mice, and just less insects in general.
So, get a caulk gun and external caulk and seal up any cracks.
So the bats weren’t interested in eating the ladybugs I guess.
The house is large. The bats were in a section of the attic behind a wall for the attic cedar closet. We had probably 100 or more, but they were never seen inside the house except 2 times in 11 years. The bugs got in there, and other places too. But the bat exclusion process involves sealing the entire house. So, you get rid of bats and the bugs are much reduced.
The stink bugs are a HUGE problem for agriculture — they do just enough damage to fruit to render them unsellable (my info comes from the apple industry).
USDA has made these pests a high priority target.
The bugs are illegal immigrants, but the USDA has to be careful about introducing yet another new species to kill the stink bugs.