Bug Books at Amazon.com
Sometimes new things are exciting and sometimes they’re just an irritation! For instance, when you move house to America, and set up home on a whole new continent, you’ve no clue what to expect when it comes to common bugs.
Finding a new bug while on vacation might be fascinating, or not depending on your feelings toward bugs, but daily encounters with common bugs when you’re struggling to take care of feeding your family, purchasing a car, sourcing insurance, finding a home to buy, checking out a whole new education system, adjusting to a new climate, trying to find a doctor you can trust, getting used to driving on the opposite side of the road, and at least a handful of other things I’ve probably blanked from my mind, well, that’s just a bunch of stress.
This is the situation I found myself in when transplanted from Bonny Scotland to the heat of Texas. I wasn’t exactly excited to discover crawling cockroaches that had been running rampant in my new home while I slept without even a sheet covering me because of the heat. I was extremely upset and became almost paranoid after Game Boy (1yr old at the time) ran over a fire ants nest and got his legs covered in bites. And I was totally overwhelmed when we had to throw out all our open packet food after it was invaded by flour mites that had been living in the pantry waiting to march out of the cracks as soon as we provided something tasty. I’m sure all of this would have been quite manageable to a local, but without knowledge I felt totally powerless.
Clearly what I needed was some common sense pest control for common bugs. I’m not even sure how I discovered it, because I’d no internet access at the time, but I discovered just the book I needed, a bible for those who want to control pests without poisoning themselves in the process, “Common Sense Pest Control” by William Olkowski, Sheila Daar and Helga Olkowski. This was just the book for me (it probably helped that I’d studied pest control in college). With it in hand I learned that the cockroaches were not going to take over my home and kitchen and live in every crack – the kind I had like to live outside under leaves and bark. I found a way to kill not just a few fire ants through spraying, but to effectively destroy all of the colonies in my yard and make it safe for Game Boy to run around barefoot. And I figured out that air-tight containers were the answer to keeping creepy stuff out the food in my pantry. I was able to lay my paranoia to rest and sleep soundly at night without giant attacks of bugs crawling through my dreams. I was even open once again to the fact that bugs are fun and do good work for the Earth. It’s amazing what a good book can do. What a relief!
My favorite bug books: Usborne 1001 Bugs to Spot, Big Bug Search/Great Searches, Insects in Kansas.
Some favorite bug websites: BugGuide.net, Insect Places to Visit, Top 10 Most Beautiful Caterpillars, Largest Insects, Bug Girls Blog, Amateur Entomologists’ Society.
Relate a bug encounter, or tell me about a book that had an amazing impact on you. Let me know and I’ll link. Sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite!
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thanks for all the great resources! i have annual hopes of planting a huge garden and eating my own food….yet to materialize.
but a girl can dream…and plan ahead for pests!
Well, lately it’s been fleas, fruit flies and Asian beetles (introduced to Minnesota by our Department of Natural Resources to kill something else and then die in Winter….they didn’t and are now a bigger pest than what they were brought in to kill). I can’t wait for a good hard frost and 6 inches of snow! Then we will be bug-free for 8 glorious months (hee hee hee, not quite—maybe only really 6 months).
Tonia, I used to plan on growing a big garden. Once I decided to start TINY I figured out that I really can do this! I have two raised beds, but one would be enough to start with because I usually have at least some part of my two beds, if not one whole one, idle/resting at any point in time.
I think raised beds are the best if you can do them – you can put the plants closer together so the yield is bigger than you’d expect. For instance, in the spring I grow enough lettuce for both my family of four and my neighbor for a month or two with just about 8 foot of lettuce row.
Sarah, I never knew that fleas could live outside until I moved here. Fleas trying to live outside in Scotland would probably either drown or freeze!
I long for the cold weather to get rid of chiggers and ticks. For most of the summer I was driven crazy for about a week after walking across my garden because the chiggers got me! Ticks I don’t have at home, but we go out to work at a farm where there is woodland and long grass and we always have to check for ticks, which carry diseases, afterward.
That’s surely bad news about the Asian beetles. I heard that there is a problem with earthworms up your way too. If I remember rightly the natural woodland ecosystem has been messed up by the introduction of earthworms.
When my oldest was six, she was scared of all bugs. We had the good fortune of visiting my sister in CA that summer, and she introduced us to the “bug guy” at the Natural History Museum of LA (she worked there). I completely recommend finding a local entomologist to talk with if you have bug issues. Their excitement about their chosen field just rubs off on you.
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Peace and Laughter!
That’s a great suggestion Jugglingpaynes. I also discovered county extension offices after I found the book. I’d never heard of such a thing as a phone line where there is someone waiting to answer your domestic questions! I’ve used them a fair bit since, though I must say they don’t tend to know much about integrated pest management.