Category: Bugs

Bugs from Hell

When Summer arrived so too did the cockroaches. I loathe them above all other bugs from Hell. I know they are obligatory in this climate and it’s not like we’re infested. It was just the one that popped in from the garden to have a nose around. Nevertheless it made my stomach turn as it sprinted across the living room floor with its long antennae wiggling about. It was reddish brown. I’ve never seen a reddish brown one before. Trapper Liam, last of the great white hunters, set forth to capture and dispose of the canny creature. He chased the roach round the room for a quite a while until he finally managed to capture it in a downturned glass. Liam cautiously slipped a piece of card under the glass, lifted it gently with its contents violently wriggling and moved slowly to the bathroom. His hand slipped in his attempt to flush the beast away. The rim of the glass decapitated the bug against the pan, guillotining the head cleanly from the torso in single movement. Like a scene from Alien, the headless creature refused to die and writhed around the glass for what seemed like hours. It’s the stuff of my nightmares.

If you like bug tales you’ll love these:

Murder, He Wrote

A Biblical Plague

Mosquito Massacre

We may be suffering from an advanced case of heat exhaustion but at least the much anticipated mozzie threat, like Saddam’s WMD, has been wildly exaggerated. When we lived in suburban Yalıkavak Liam suffered unrelenting assaults from the most ubiquitous of warm weather pests. There’s a definite benefit to living along one of Old Bodrum Town’s busy thoroughfares. The weekly bug-busting van that tours the streets at night drapes the entire house in mustard gas and nips the nasty nibblers in the bud. It probably exterminates all insect life except cockroaches which are indestructible and the true heirs to a post-apocalyptic world.

If you like bug tales you may like Bugs

It’s a Bug’s Life

Now we’ve moved to the gaudy lights of Bodrum Town we no longer hear the rhythmic call of crickets that rocked us gently to sleep but are mercifully spared the worst ravages of the squadrons of ravenous mosquitos that disturbed our slumber. Mother Nature’s splendid beasts are a wonder to behold, even the bug variety (except cockroaches which are an abomination).

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I should add I don’t extend my wonderment to the glory of nature to the army of tiny brown ants that I found marching across our kitchen work surface. Dousing them in bleach soon dealt with that little problem.

If you like bug tales, you’ll love Bugs

Murder, He Wrote

I’m encouraging a vine to tumble over the railings of our first floor balcony. To my dismay the leading tips were infested with aphids. I could hardly see the delicate green shoots for the fat clusters of writhing black bugs. Along came an army of ants to harvest the honeydew that blackfly excrete from their nether regions. I was up close and personal to watch the toxic bugs raise their backsides to let the ants feed. Yuk! The intimate, symbiotic relationship that exists between these creatures is a wonder of nature. Well I was having none of it. I sprayed them all with copious quantities of soapy water. It was bit like watching a disco full of drugged-up ravers being drowned at a foam party. Murder, he wrote.

On the whole I rather admire ants and their ability to clean up the litter of dead bugs that regularly fall to earth. As I was sipping my morning cuppa I observed a platoon of tiny ants (a different breed from the aphid arse-lickers) slowly tug a dead fly the comparative size of a jumbo jet across the patio. Their collective iron grip was momentarily loosened and their prey tumbled into the gap between the floor tiles. It must have seemed like lunch had fallen into a monsoon drain. Unperturbed, the industrious insects hauled the fly carcass from the depths and continued their mammoth trek back to the nest. Marvellous.

Fat Fly Season

The weather has finally turned glorious after an unpromising start but it’s fat fly season. Turkish flies are so much bigger and more annoying than their British relatives. Liam has become a serial bug killer, declaring chemical war on the troublesome pests. Busy bees are buzzing about the buds, all manner of creepy crawlies are creepy crawling, the mozzie net is up and the duvet reduced to a sheet.

I climbed an old rickety ladder to turn on the solar hot water system and we bought a ceiling fan for the bedroom which I proudly installed. I used extra long screws to fix it to the ceiling. I can’t be sure I haven’t punctured the flat roof. We’ll know next time it rains. We feared decapitation when we first turned it on. Liam flicked the switch and we watched the blades slowly rotate like a turbo-prop. Hey presto, I’m now a qualified electrical engineer as well as a bone fide plumber.

Bursting into Life

The mould season is drying out. Spring is in the air and there is a spring in our step. The warming rays have stirred us from the benign boredom of our winter hibernation. Flowers are bursting into life, shorts are being aired and flip-flops dusted down. Alas, the mozzie season approaches alongside. Relentless and voracious, Turkish mozzies just love to feast on poor Liam. Dive bombing like kamikaze pilots they show him no mercy. At times he resembles a medieval pox victim. We’ve purchased several kegs of napalm and rinsed out the net as a precaution. Thank God that there is no malaria in our corner of the World.

Vorsprung Durch Technik

We took breakfast at the hotel, a predictable and unadventurous spread with cereal that looked and tasted like ‘Go Cat’. The only other guests were a troupe of Teutonic trekkers dressed in sturdy sensible shoes and beige pack-a-macs preparing for the day’s hike. I watched in silent awe as lunches were deftly packed into tuppaware with all the efficiency of a BMW production line. Vorsprung Durch Technik.

The Birds

Our final jaunt was to Miletos, located in an altogether more agreeable stretch of terrain. We meandered through the Menderes delta passing through cotton fields and jobbing agro-köys arriving at the remains in time for a late lunch. Regrettably, Liam and I were rather ruined-out, so we took tea in a rickety café to admire the imposing amphitheatre from afar leaving the muscle boys to scramble alone. Their stay was prematurely curtailed by a scourge of ravenous mosquitos. They took fright from the site frantically flailing their arms around like Tippi Hedren in ‘The Birds’.

A Biblical Plague

We’ve been little troubled by mozzies thus far though I expect this not to last. However, the apartment has been infested by a plague of flies of biblical proportions. Liam and I lay in our bed like great white hunters armed with cans of ‘Raid’ taking pot shots at the swarming pestilence. By morning, the floor was carpeted with the wreckage like a scene from the Battle of Britain.