And there came a grievous swarm of flies....

Well.. maybe it's nothing so dramatic -- but it really does make me start to wonder.

After every hurricane there have always been plenty of insects to deal with. The fallen trees drive bees from their hives and the torrential rains flood wasp nests and fireant cities -- sending them all scurrying out in terrible moods. The wasps were always a scourge during debris clean-up. I would inevitably run across a fistful of the things clinging to the underside of a damp fallen branch. *shudder* And the fireants -- that's always a sight to see... Washed out of their subterranean tunnels they form reddish-brown clumps to save themselves from rising water and drift with the current. These reddish-brown clumps look like nothing more than piles of dirt to us poor humans who then go out to sweep or shovel up the mud only to find it explode into a billion really angry ants. *shudder*

Katrina was a bizarre hurricane. (Have I hinted at this before?) I can't say that the wasp and ant problem was quite what I had expected. I found no clumps of evil ants masquerading as potting soil... and there were no wasp swarms. Yes, there was a constant flow of yellow jackets and paper wasps coming into the open kitchen windows for weeks after the storm... but not in the numbers I had grown accustomed to following a hurricane.

Flies -- flies are another story. I'm no entomologist. I have no idea what these flies are called. All I know is they look like houseflies but they're meaner. Mean flies that never hesitate to bite. There were trillions of them. A couple of weeks after the storm you could look out our back porch window and watch the ground move. It moved. The whole ground -- the whole back yard... If you were silly enough to open the door -- the ground would swarm. There was a horrible humming, rattling sound out there for weeks.

I know we did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of flies in the backyard. I understand that their population boom itself caused their decline... We tried though... We hosed down the yard and shovelled out contaminated dirt... I even took to collecting toads and lizards wherever I could find them and rangling them into our backyard. I kept thinking some birds would be nice too -- but could find none to rangle... Ah, but yes... eventually the flies disappeared.

Then came the mosquitoes.

They're always awful this time of year.. and worse now with the extra standing water throughout the county coupled with the lack of mosquito control going on.... But mosquitoes are easily deterred... A few drops of cinnamon oil & a drop of eucalyptus in a vegetable oil base spread on exposed skin and the buggers won't mess with you for a couple of hours.

Gnats are another thing entirely... I think they like cinnamon.. and the vegetable oil just helps them stick in place long enough to sting repeatedly. Besides -- gnats haven't the sense of 'pest etiquette' that other biting insects seem to have... They don't consider areas of the body covered with clothing to be off-limits. They have no problem biting your face, your nose, your scalp or inside your ears. And considering that it seems to take about 30 gnats to take up the same area as a single polite mosquito....

The gnats have arrived. Let's call them Katrina gnats. Under every damp leaf in the yard there are a million of them. I itch just typing about it. I don't recall being plagued with gnats in cool weather before... These are super gnats. We are plagued with super gnats.

A couple of nights ago we were all standing in our yard swatting at gnats when a large grasshopper fluttered to rest just a couple of feet from us. We all stared at the bug.

Great. Next we'll have locusts.

Can't we have a plague of dragonflies to eat the gnats? I mean, I like dragonflies. They're cute and they don't bite the inside of my ears. What more could one want in an insect?