Asian Beetles!

Asian Beetles are the scourge of the Midwest! They are the bane of my existence! They stink, they bite, they die all over my house, and I HATE THEM!

Asian Beetles, dead in my hand. Swept off a window sill. :(

Asian Beetles were imported to the United States as a “Biological Control Agent.” Some of them (gasp!) escaped, and they have now invaded the entire Midwest and are rapidly spreading. Just think…some of those killer Asian Carp escaped, and now they are whacking people right out of their boats up and down the Mississippi River! And they are making their way up here to Minnesota, too. There have been reports of killer fish sightings in a few lakes in the Twin Cities area. Great. Just great. Not only do we have to contend with mosquitoes big enough to pick you up and carry you into the bushes to eat you, we now have to carry a weapon to fight off the fish!! Only in America.....

These blasted beetles were brought over here to eat aphids, an act, which I am told, they are actually good at. Studies show that they can consume from 90-270 per day. I would not know. I kill them just as soon as I see them. As a means of self-defense, I purchased a mighty expensive spray to spray around my windows and doors in the fall. Well, it didn’t work. They got in here, anyway. And I killed and killed and vacuumed and swept. And then winter happened, and all things slept. Until now. And here they are again, in full force, crawling across my windows and pooping all over everything. Have you ever squished one of those things? They STINK! And all the times I have tried vacuuming them, my sinuses would get all clogged and I would get sick feeling from the stench. I kept telling myself to just knock it off – it’s just a bug, for crying out loud! Now I read on the Internet that people have actually been found to be allergic to them, and most people get “sinus irritations from the smell”. Well, go figure! The reason that they smell is because they have a “foul-smelling defensive chemical” which they release if annoyed. They bite me in the face in the middle of the night and I am the one that gets annoyed! Darn it anyway.

What do we do about them, you ask? Well, there is the terribly expensive SPRAY that I mentioned earlier; there are GLUE STRIPS, which you may place at every window (EVERY WINDOW in the house??? I think NOT, thank you very much!!!); a foul smelling REPELLANT that you can mix up yourself (no idea on this one); and, of course, VACUUMING, which I have already tried, and nearly died.

This is the window in the entry way, south side of the house. This is two days worth of Asian beetles. Deceased. This is how every window in the house looks. Cleaning the window sills is almost a daily occurance around this place!

From past experience, I have found that they usually just sort of ‘peter-out’ when the warmer weather gets here. And they end up outside, where they make millions and billions and trillions of other Asian Beetles, which end up in my house again, come fall.

I wish that the government would stop importing all these INVASIVE SPECIES and just leave things as they are!

On a lighter note, I finally finished my 2nd sockie, so both of my feet are very happy! And warm. Note: See the Geraniums? They sit in front of the patio window, on the south side of the house. And they are very anxious to get their feet in the dirt outside again, soon!