Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Love Bugs, Car Wash, and such�

With pairs of love bugs (the tiny flies) ending up splattered all over the place but especially on the cars, all the cars around here make South FL as if the place was doused with black rain. For some reason or another, the bugs choose the roads and highways as their mating ground, ruining the finishes on the vehicles as well as losing their lives.

This is the way they do their stuff according to Phil Koehler, the urban entomologist at the University of Florida: “"Love Bugs are small flies that are in the process of mating when they swarm over the roads. So usually there are two individuals: the large one is the female and the small one is the male. The female usually gets her way and she drags the male around with her." Smart lady! Even if half of the time they are both flattened on the cars’ windshields and grills…

Luckily, this is only seasonal and lasts a few short weeks. Usually, we take this on the chin with patience, but this year with the drought and water restrictions, we can’t even hose the cars down.

Florida’s Environment Studies people say the bugs don’t do well during a drought, but someone must have been assessing something wrong, because this year, they are impossible.

Controlling them is impossible, too, because one: As beneficial insects, the immature bugs help break down organic matter. And two: No control methods exist. Anything that could control them would kill bees and butterflies also.

Anyhow, in our town, houses with the odd numbers can water the lawn or use the hose between 5-7 PM Mondays and Wednesdays, the even numbers get Tuesdays and Thursdays. Since half the population is in their senior years, most forget which day of the week we are on. To be on the safe side, no one on my street waters anything.

This was one of the reasons we told ourselves why we took the car to the car wash today. The real reason is sloth.

Car wash establishments are exempt from the water restrictions. Luckily this is not the type of carwash place where you sit inside the car as it goes through all that sudsy scrubbing and spraying. $11:99 for full service sounds like a great deal and we usually take the car there. Today, they had a sign up. “Removal of love bugs is $4 extra.” But if you add to it the gas used up while waiting in line for forty-five minutes with the motor running, it becomes a pricey posh job.

I was cracking jokes like, “The Arabs must have started these car wash businesses,” but when our turn came and we exited the car, a horde of people who looked as if they were from south of the border dashed through all four doors, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing. God, they were so hard-working…really. I have half a mind of inviting them to my house.

Then, we entered inside the store to pay and to watch from the large glass windows the cars sliding through as they got a thorough cleaning. The store offers a multitude of bric-a-bracs, mostly cutesy stuff, for the car owners. I am not a thing person, because things need dusting and I rather keep the dusting to minimum in my house; however, it was fun watching them as if I was in a museum of sorts while hubby paid up. The car came out perfectly clean.

Then, on the way home, it got splattered with love bugs all over again. This time it was WD 40 to the rescue, because that is just about the only thing that takes them out. We can’t leave the remains of the love bugs on the car. They eat into the finish.

Did we really need to go to the carwash place if we had to work on the car again? You bet. I enjoyed the whole thing and all the people in the store I made small talk with.