Unintended Consequences...And Mosquitos

 I tried to get a picture of a mosquito flying around our house or in our yard, but turns out I don't want to wait for one of them to land on me and suck my blood while I'm taking out my phone to capture the shot.

So, I did an internet search and took a picture of the bug instead.

It's better that way.

What's not better is something we discovered this past week...discovered by accident.

If you pay someone to kill spiders around your house, it appears that causes the mosquito population around that house to explode.

I could be wrong. I'm no scientist. We hired a service to kill the spiders around our house. Great, we thought. Many had knocked on our door in the past selling death to pesky spiders. This time we bit--we hired them to do their deeds. A few days later, we can hardly go outside during certain times of the day without being swarmed by the biting bugs. Of course, there may be absolutely no correlation between the killing of the mosquito-eating life forms and the abundance of mosquitos.

Then again...

Last weekend, as I drove home, I saw a sign for mosquito abatement services...maybe it's the same people we hired to kill the spiders. Now that's a racket!

I Just Wanted To Cool Down The Car...Not Kill A Bunch Of Wasps

Growing up, I lived across the street from where I now live. With my father passing away when I was young, my mother raised three kids on her own and sometimes we didn't have a lot of money when things needed to get fixed. For example, the A/C unit at home died and wasn't fixed for several years. We just camped out in a back room and used fans. We got by. The same thing happened to the cars we had. Many times, there was no A/C. Again, we got by.

What does this have to do with killing a bunch of wasps?

Good question.

This past week has been the warmest of the year so far. It usually gets warm in Utah in the summer--where we live it's not so warm you die if you're outside too long, but warm enough. And because it's so warm, I try and park my car in the shade, if possible. I guess it's holdover from when we didn't have any A/C at home or in our cars.

This week, because it was so hot, I decided to crack the car windows about half an inch to let the heat out so when I climbed in around 5pm, it didn't feel like the seventh level of Hades. Even though my car has pretty good A/C, for a couple of days it helped, but yesterday, when my daughter and I climbed in to go to rehearsal, I noticed a dead wasp on the back seat. First I made sure it was dead, then I tried to brush it off the seat and out of the car.

That's when I saw another dead wasp in the window.

I then saw two more dead insects at the base of the window.

I then saw several others dead on the floor.

Uh oh, I thought. I wondered if there was a wasp nest somewhere in the car. It's happened before when I've parked a car for a few months. But I've been driving this car everyday. There couldn't be a nest in the car. Then it hit--lowering the windows allowed the bugs to fly in and they couldn't get out. It was so hot they fried.

I have a general rule about bugs, especially those that bite and sting. I'll try not to bother them in their house (outside), if they stay out of my house (inside). I'm not sure how that applies to the situation with the bugs and my car, though. I know I don't want to fry any more wasps like that. I guess I'll just be a little more uncomfortable until the car cools down.