@Jamileigh17@rtjhnstn
We had bedbugs and lice at my old workplace for a long time. That was the only time I ever really hated coming home. I was in so much fear that I would bring them home with me even though I was so careful and stripped in the garage and showered right away.
Anything that can kill with venom or transmit deadly disease!
And I rescue spiders when I can so it’s not a phobia thing.
And the picture of the beetle below: harmless.
No other bug scares the living hell out of me like a Mud Dauber can. Had one invade my house last year. Was making burgers and felt something smack the side of my head pretty hard. Look around and on my cutting board was this inch and a half long hell spawn wasp acting offended I was in its way. It immediately got a pickle jar slapped over it, followed by instant eviction.
Figured that was the last of it - NOPE. Had another one somehow get into my house a week ago. Was on the phone with my brother when it buzzed by my face. I screamed and he burst into a fit of laughter at my 0-11 fear level.
Spent the better part of an hour with a sauerkraut jar chasing the little demon. Put on a hoodie for protection and at one point tennis slammed it with my sleeve when it went straight for my face. Does not help I have two skylights that it kept bouncing between so I had to repeatedly get up on my tall ladder to attempt to trap it. Finally jarred the trice damned thing and went to let it go off my back deck. Ha-ha, nope, sucks to be you because there was another one banging into my back door. Had to keep it in the jar until nightfall, then with extreme prejudice ejected it.
You wanna know the extra scary fact about these thing that makes them better or worse depending on your outlook? These things paralyze spiders, then bring them to their nest and lay eggs on them. The babies come into the world with a convenient snack right there the moment they roll out of bed. If you remove the nest a bunch of spiders just rain down as if to just rub in the horror of it all.
Even better? Mud daubers are responsible for THREE plane crashes. One of which everyone on board died, and another killed all the crew and 176 passengers.
So that’s my damn vote. You said comments please. Mud daubers are the worst bug.
@zenzic My mother used to coat us in sulfur dust. It must have lasted because I have not seen chiggers or their effects in decades. (But I’m very partial to the smell of a burning match…)
@kittykat9180 Indeed I do. (Seresto collars are amazingly effective, but they’re not a suit of armor.) He is a white, short-handed mixed-breed, and ticks crawling on him are readily apparent. I grab them off of him while they are still on the prowl. The ones I miss and find burrowed in are almost always deceased.
I feel like everyone is missing something. It’s a ton of ants. Not ants. I think 2000lbs of ants should be terrifying. Not that I ever thought about that till meh asked
@unksol A ton of fire ants would make it worse. It hurts like hell to be stung by them and usually it isn’t just one, it becomes a swarm. Once taking adjudicated youth canoeing across the state of FL we set up camp by a HUGE nest probably 18" tall. No one saw it and several of us were sitting on the ground leaning against a big tree (they were on the other side) and got attacked. I herded them all into the water (gators and water moccasins be damned) to drown them to quickly get them off of us. We had to evacuate one student because of all the swelling from the bites.
@Kyeh@unksol Maybe they had to send @mediocrebot off for the Holiday weekend just so they could let us talk about ants without irritating him/her/it too much. Which would be awesome getting a vacation just because you hate ants.
@Kyeh@pmarin I mean if you just walked into a ton of ants in a pool. You would literally drown in ants if all the bugs were on fair footing.a ton of wasps say. But a ton of ants. I can run from a wasp
@sicc574 Big Brother rarely wastes their time bugging individual phones anymore. They intercept at the phone company CO (central office) if you’re still on copper. Otherwise, off of the cell towers, or satellites.
(And the aftermath of those drunken one night stands… I presume it was Nix or Kwell to the rescue?)
I grew up in New Orleans, La. I truly hate roaches. In NOLA the huge ones are called TREE ROACHES - 2-3 INCHES long. They fly! Ugh. They can be bigger too! They fly in your face & hair! I lived in South Fl over 20 years & they talk about PALMETTO BUGS but they are NOT AS BIG AS tree roaches. I only saw 1 huge roach in S FL - big one about 2 inches but it did not fly. I miss NOLA but not those huge TREE ROACHES. They’re so disgusting!
@Redbird1325 I am originally from Houma so I definitely sympathize with this. I live in Oregon now and we don’t have anything remotely like that here. I always forget how prevalent roaches are in the warmer humid climates. I don’t miss having the massive flying roaches in my face!
@Redbird1325@sillyheathen There is no way to keep roaches and green lizards out of most houses in the deep south. That being said my cats caught and ate the lizards and caught, played with and killed roaches (they each discovered they don’t taste good - I’d see a dead roach in cat vomit - one per cat, once only).
OMG though the one night one of my cats was running around my bed in the middle of the night, then jump off and then jump back on and I didn’t know why. Turned on the light. She was playing with a roach ON MY BED!! When it would fall off the bed she’d gently pick it up in her mouth bring it back on to the bed and play until it fell off again. Rinse and repeat. Seriously gross. So I caught it, opened the window and screen and threw it out. That cat was not happy with me.
Can confirm NOLA flying roaches. You never forget that dry crackling flapping sound of their wings. No idea why they are attracted to land in peoples hair, but they do.
And they can chug Raid like it was a Spring Break beer funnel contest.
I sat on a wicker chair under a friend’s patio once, and a scorpion hopped under the elastic band of my shorts and stung me on the ass.
I broke the sound barrier jumping up and howling as it ran around in the back of my pants, stinging me a total of 4 or 5 more times before I dropped trou’ so the critter could make its escape.
I still look very carefully before sitting down outside.
bugs i hate the most that i’m actually likely to encounter:
house centipede. i know they won’t hurt me and that they eat other pests but they’re just nightmarish to me.
flies. not just any flies but these dumb slow swarming houseflies that appear INSIDE the windows. i have to vacuum them alive. the entry room sunroom has dead ones all around the windows and i’ve seen a column of live ones just hovering in place outside. again, harmless, but they disgust me and give me the creeps.
bugs i’m unlikely to encounter but still scare me in theory:
For some reason, this is the first year I have had earwigs outside of my house…
And on my house, and in the yard, and hiding under the barbecue, and inside the garage door opener, and in the siding, and basically as many and as close as they can get without actually coming inside. I think they’re trying to surround us in preparation for some kind of sting operation…
If you’re sorting by bugs that I’d take the most extreme measures against, I’d go with bedbugs, lice, termites and yellow jackets, in that order.
Most consistently annoyed with, mosquitos and no-see-ums.
Most likely to make me jump, cicada killers. They look and sound like a cross between a B-17 and a yellow jacket. Apparently they are not aggressive toward humans, but it takes a good 5 seconds for that to console me when I’m working under a car and a mutant B-17 with a freaking 3/8" stinger lands a foot away from my head to bury a freshly paralyzed cicada.
@mehcuda67 I used to be that way with lice, but after my kids got it 500 times in elementary school, we learned how to spot them fast and clean them out faster.
@macromeh I almost chose this but the idea of a fly larvae buried in my skin that lives there for months until it ejects itself is just a little too much for me. I would definitely freak if I found one of those in our garden though.
Going to have to agree with bedbugs. Pretty much anything else can be dealt with one way or the other but a bug that hides in tiny crevices and can live over a year without food and is normal bug spray resistant… Hard pass.
@pauLuap earwig but your normal perimeter pesticide should kill them. I just use bifenthrin in a two pound sprayer and it kills everything . I do use the 25.4 perfect oil concentrate but it’s old and the 7-8% water based is fine. It’s the stuff in Ortho home defense. Just doesn’t last as long between sprays
@pauLuap@unksol
Earwigs look creepy but they’re harmless, except they’ll eat your plants, maybe. I think they got their name from eating ears of corn, but they don’t get into our ears.
@unksol Nice, thanks! I’m embarrassed-ish to say, I never really thought to try doing something about ‘em (e.g. chemical warfare). I just accepted them. As @Kyeh notes, they’re harmless, so I just figured it’s earwig season, aka: "it’s bug cussin’ time!"
@Kyeh@pauLuap
Yea they don’t hurt much. I’ve had them up in the siding and ton come out. Only a few ever make it inside. No need to spray if they are staying outside.
I do the perimeter so they all find better places to live. I don’t go full on war
Small reddish brown June bugs. They fly, have exoskeletons, and are exceptionally dumb…which means they fly at your face or into your hair. The worst is hearing one flying around in the dark and then the gross little click of it landing SOMEWHERE. I HATE them. I’m not a fan of spiders but those June bugs freak me out the most.
I took my two required biological science credits in college in the department of entomology. I kept hissing cockroaches for the second semester as it was required. BTW they are very clean, eat fruit, and are so slow that they are ones you usually see in movies. I had countless ones in my hand. Nothing venomous, of course, but the feeling of a millipede was just too much. So creepy feeling all those feet move. (I am not afraid of snakes, but those little feet. Ugh.)
We’ve had a ton of rain lately and it seems to make the fire ants decide to sprout wings and migrate to another area. Unfortunately that area is often the pool. They will float around on the surface, then if you are kind enough to give them a place to climb up on to safety (like when you swim by…) they will bite the shit out of you. If you try to scoop them up with a net, they will re-animate and crawl around on the net until they fall off back in the pool. If you empty the net next to the pool they will f’n FLY BACK IN! The only thing that works is to empty the net into a bucket or tub of water and let the little bastards drown.
Oh… and horseflies.
A friend of mine has a yellow jacket colony nesting in his front lawn. They were getting into his house and stinging him. I found an article online about using a shop vac to vacuum them out - and that’s what he did!
@Kyeh I used a vac to get rid of the fruit flies in my house once. You need to be sure to then put the vac outside or they all escape and you get to do it again (voice of experience LOL). I had yellow jackets as well as fire ants in my front (and back) yard, when I had one, here. I used poison. Your method sounds much more environmentally friendly.
ROACHES!!! We have had two rental properties infested by renters who brought them in. It takes at least six months of professional strength treatment to get rid of them. They are so fast you can’t catch to squash even one, multiply exponentially, eggs survive for months before hatching, can even hatch from dead mothers. Nasty critters!
@dyounghbic I’d agree. Took me 11 mo to get rid of the roaches when I initially moved into this apt. The first night I put out a sticky sheet just to see at what level the problem was. Not happy in the morning as I caught 40 something of them, both young and old.
Now with the foundation work going on they are back. The bulk those of us have at our end of the building are German roaches although for the first time I have a few American cockroaches (they probably came in under the door as I see dead ones in the hall; I attach a lower door rubber thing but the seal of the door against the rug isn’t perfect). This place only has the company come once every 10 or so weeks to deal with the roaches which isn’t even close to frequently enough to deal with the issue. I finally broke down and bought combat and sticky pads about 6 or 7 months ago. Finally not catching very many. Ironically this Thursday the company will be doing my half (they do 1/2 a floor a week). I am going to swap out my many roaches pad with the ones with few so they put enough poison in here.
These two photos are of a 3.5 week collection (saving them for the exterminator company).
This photo is what I have collected in 4.5 days - much better (the other ones are empty) so finally making major headway.
By the way the Terro stickies are really crappy. Catchmaster is better but the a brand. The best is the more rectangular one Pest Pro but I can’t find them right now. (not to mention pest pro sticks way better to cat paws too).
Bedbugs.
@Jamileigh17 this 100%, not even close
@Jamileigh17 Followed only by centipedes
@Jamileigh17 @rtjhnstn
We had bedbugs and lice at my old workplace for a long time. That was the only time I ever really hated coming home. I was in so much fear that I would bring them home with me even though I was so careful and stripped in the garage and showered right away.
Mosquitos! Most deadly too humans too!
Roaches.
@njfan
yeah, and those big f’n palmetto bugs!
The one that crashes my game before I save.
@PooltoyWolf My job is to find those kind of bugs, so I guess they are OK with me. Not in games, though – more boring stuff.
I hate scorpions.
Yuk.
Cockroaches, palmetto bugs.
Anything that can kill with venom or transmit deadly disease!
And I rescue spiders when I can so it’s not a phobia thing.
And the picture of the beetle below: harmless.
This one.
No other bug scares the living hell out of me like a Mud Dauber can. Had one invade my house last year. Was making burgers and felt something smack the side of my head pretty hard. Look around and on my cutting board was this inch and a half long hell spawn wasp acting offended I was in its way. It immediately got a pickle jar slapped over it, followed by instant eviction.
Figured that was the last of it - NOPE. Had another one somehow get into my house a week ago. Was on the phone with my brother when it buzzed by my face. I screamed and he burst into a fit of laughter at my 0-11 fear level.
Spent the better part of an hour with a sauerkraut jar chasing the little demon. Put on a hoodie for protection and at one point tennis slammed it with my sleeve when it went straight for my face. Does not help I have two skylights that it kept bouncing between so I had to repeatedly get up on my tall ladder to attempt to trap it. Finally jarred the trice damned thing and went to let it go off my back deck. Ha-ha, nope, sucks to be you because there was another one banging into my back door. Had to keep it in the jar until nightfall, then with extreme prejudice ejected it.
You wanna know the extra scary fact about these thing that makes them better or worse depending on your outlook? These things paralyze spiders, then bring them to their nest and lay eggs on them. The babies come into the world with a convenient snack right there the moment they roll out of bed. If you remove the nest a bunch of spiders just rain down as if to just rub in the horror of it all.
Even better? Mud daubers are responsible for THREE plane crashes. One of which everyone on board died, and another killed all the crew and 176 passengers.
So that’s my damn vote. You said comments please. Mud daubers are the worst bug.
@Tiamat114 Terrifying.
@Tiamat114 idk… They don’t bother you and they are big enough to shoot with a red Ryder. I’ve done it . In my t16 speeder
Chiggers…worse than poison ivy
@zenzic My mother used to coat us in sulfur dust. It must have lasted because I have not seen chiggers or their effects in decades. (But I’m very partial to the smell of a burning match…)
Bot fly…….
Ticks. This summer, I can remove 20-30 from my dog during a single 1-hour walk.
@Ambiverbal, you don’t have your dog on preventative?
@kittykat9180 Indeed I do. (Seresto collars are amazingly effective, but they’re not a suit of armor.) He is a white, short-handed mixed-breed, and ticks crawling on him are readily apparent. I grab them off of him while they are still on the prowl. The ones I miss and find burrowed in are almost always deceased.
@Ambiverbal, I see.
I have a black shepherd mix. Lots of thick fur but I don’t live where there’s many ticks.
I feel like everyone is missing something. It’s a ton of ants. Not ants. I think 2000lbs of ants should be terrifying. Not that I ever thought about that till meh asked
@unksol driver ants
@unksol Huh, Mediocrebot certainly seems to think so and normally reacts but it didn’t this time for some reason.
@unksol A ton of fire ants would make it worse. It hurts like hell to be stung by them and usually it isn’t just one, it becomes a swarm. Once taking adjudicated youth canoeing across the state of FL we set up camp by a HUGE nest probably 18" tall. No one saw it and several of us were sitting on the ground leaning against a big tree (they were on the other side) and got attacked. I herded them all into the water (gators and water moccasins be damned) to drown them to quickly get them off of us. We had to evacuate one student because of all the swelling from the bites.
@Kyeh @unksol Maybe they had to send @mediocrebot off for the Holiday weekend just so they could let us talk about ants without irritating him/her/it too much. Which would be awesome getting a vacation just because you hate ants.
DIPLOMAT! RAT-A-TAT! FAT CAT! AWESOME!
@pmarin @unksol
I guess it’s still on duty for the awe-word…
@Kyeh @pmarin I mean if you just walked into a ton of ants in a pool. You would literally drown in ants if all the bugs were on fair footing.a ton of wasps say. But a ton of ants. I can run from a wasp
@pmarin @unksol These:
https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/meet-the-bullet-ant-the-amazons-most-lethal-insect/
Termites
Oh, and Asp caterpillars. I’d never had anything hurt quite so much before. Made me seriously fantasize about sawing my foot off.
@sillyheathen +1 for Bot Flies. That really triggers my tryptophoia.
/me shudders
@zenzic
Yes!
/giphy shudders
The “bugs” that big brother uses to tap my phone…Either those or the kind my friend use to pick up during his drunken one night stands…
@sicc574 Big Brother rarely wastes their time bugging individual phones anymore. They intercept at the phone company CO (central office) if you’re still on copper. Otherwise, off of the cell towers, or satellites.
(And the aftermath of those drunken one night stands… I presume it was Nix or Kwell to the rescue?)
I grew up in New Orleans, La. I truly hate roaches. In NOLA the huge ones are called TREE ROACHES - 2-3 INCHES long. They fly! Ugh. They can be bigger too! They fly in your face & hair! I lived in South Fl over 20 years & they talk about PALMETTO BUGS but they are NOT AS BIG AS tree roaches. I only saw 1 huge roach in S FL - big one about 2 inches but it did not fly. I miss NOLA but not those huge TREE ROACHES. They’re so disgusting!
@Redbird1325 I am originally from Houma so I definitely sympathize with this. I live in Oregon now and we don’t have anything remotely like that here. I always forget how prevalent roaches are in the warmer humid climates. I don’t miss having the massive flying roaches in my face!
@Redbird1325 @sillyheathen There is no way to keep roaches and green lizards out of most houses in the deep south. That being said my cats caught and ate the lizards and caught, played with and killed roaches (they each discovered they don’t taste good - I’d see a dead roach in cat vomit - one per cat, once only).
OMG though the one night one of my cats was running around my bed in the middle of the night, then jump off and then jump back on and I didn’t know why. Turned on the light. She was playing with a roach ON MY BED!! When it would fall off the bed she’d gently pick it up in her mouth bring it back on to the bed and play until it fell off again. Rinse and repeat. Seriously gross. So I caught it, opened the window and screen and threw it out. That cat was not happy with me.
@Kidsandliz @Redbird1325 @sillyheathen
Can confirm NOLA flying roaches. You never forget that dry crackling flapping sound of their wings. No idea why they are attracted to land in peoples hair, but they do.
And they can chug Raid like it was a Spring Break beer funnel contest.
I sat on a wicker chair under a friend’s patio once, and a scorpion hopped under the elastic band of my shorts and stung me on the ass.
I broke the sound barrier jumping up and howling as it ran around in the back of my pants, stinging me a total of 4 or 5 more times before I dropped trou’ so the critter could make its escape.
I still look very carefully before sitting down outside.
So, yeah, scorpions…
The ants are never ending. Half my yard is covered in diatomaceous earth right now.
TICKS!!! They seem to be having a banner year and just before seeing Meh I checked for them (none yet).
bugs i hate the most that i’m actually likely to encounter:
bugs i’m unlikely to encounter but still scare me in theory:
For some reason, this is the first year I have had earwigs outside of my house…
And on my house, and in the yard, and hiding under the barbecue, and inside the garage door opener, and in the siding, and basically as many and as close as they can get without actually coming inside. I think they’re trying to surround us in preparation for some kind of sting operation…
If you’re sorting by bugs that I’d take the most extreme measures against, I’d go with bedbugs, lice, termites and yellow jackets, in that order.
Most consistently annoyed with, mosquitos and no-see-ums.
Most likely to make me jump, cicada killers. They look and sound like a cross between a B-17 and a yellow jacket. Apparently they are not aggressive toward humans, but it takes a good 5 seconds for that to console me when I’m working under a car and a mutant B-17 with a freaking 3/8" stinger lands a foot away from my head to bury a freshly paralyzed cicada.
@mehcuda67 I used to be that way with lice, but after my kids got it 500 times in elementary school, we learned how to spot them fast and clean them out faster.
What, no votes for the Murder Hornet?
Thankfully I’ve never encountered one, but they have been found in adjacent Washington state.
@macromeh I almost chose this but the idea of a fly larvae buried in my skin that lives there for months until it ejects itself is just a little too much for me.
I would definitely freak if I found one of those in our garden though.
Going to have to agree with bedbugs. Pretty much anything else can be dealt with one way or the other but a bug that hides in tiny crevices and can live over a year without food and is normal bug spray resistant… Hard pass.
This is one I’ve encountered all too often - it always foretells a bad day.
@macromeh you need an upgrade
@macromeh Ah, the old BSOD
This is all good info for Orkin and Terminix. Now look for targeted commercials showing up on your social media and junk mail.
The freakin’ pincher bugs (or whatever they’re called… “earwig”, maybe). I can’t stand those dang things every year.
@pauLuap earwig but your normal perimeter pesticide should kill them. I just use bifenthrin in a two pound sprayer and it kills everything . I do use the 25.4 perfect oil concentrate but it’s old and the 7-8% water based is fine. It’s the stuff in Ortho home defense. Just doesn’t last as long between sprays
There are other ones
@pauLuap @unksol
Earwigs look creepy but they’re harmless, except they’ll eat your plants, maybe. I think they got their name from eating ears of corn, but they don’t get into our ears.
@unksol Nice, thanks! I’m embarrassed-ish to say, I never really thought to try doing something about ‘em (e.g. chemical warfare). I just accepted them. As @Kyeh notes, they’re harmless, so I just figured it’s earwig season, aka: "it’s bug cussin’ time!"
@Kyeh @pauLuap
Yea they don’t hurt much. I’ve had them up in the siding and ton come out. Only a few ever make it inside. No need to spray if they are staying outside.
I do the perimeter so they all find better places to live. I don’t go full on war
@Kyeh @pauLuap @unksol
/youtube wrath of khan ear worm
@Kyeh @pauLuap @pmarin
/youtube camel spider
@pauLuap @pmarin @unksol
Uhhhh - I held a tarantula at the Butterfly Pavilion once, but I wouldn’t be up for holding that thing.
Small reddish brown June bugs. They fly, have exoskeletons, and are exceptionally dumb…which means they fly at your face or into your hair. The worst is hearing one flying around in the dark and then the gross little click of it landing SOMEWHERE. I HATE them. I’m not a fan of spiders but those June bugs freak me out the most.
@endi1276 yes. I concur with this as well. They’re a menace!
I took my two required biological science credits in college in the department of entomology. I kept hissing cockroaches for the second semester as it was required. BTW they are very clean, eat fruit, and are so slow that they are ones you usually see in movies. I had countless ones in my hand. Nothing venomous, of course, but the feeling of a millipede was just too much. So creepy feeling all those feet move. (I am not afraid of snakes, but those little feet. Ugh.)
We’ve had a ton of rain lately and it seems to make the fire ants decide to sprout wings and migrate to another area. Unfortunately that area is often the pool. They will float around on the surface, then if you are kind enough to give them a place to climb up on to safety (like when you swim by…) they will bite the shit out of you. If you try to scoop them up with a net, they will re-animate and crawl around on the net until they fall off back in the pool. If you empty the net next to the pool they will f’n FLY BACK IN! The only thing that works is to empty the net into a bucket or tub of water and let the little bastards drown.
Oh… and horseflies.
@chienfou
/youtube fire ant float
man this discussion is going to give me bug nightmares
oh, yeah, one to add:
dark crawlspaces with clumps of daddy-long-legs
A friend of mine has a yellow jacket colony nesting in his front lawn. They were getting into his house and stinging him. I found an article online about using a shop vac to vacuum them out - and that’s what he did!
@Kyeh I used a vac to get rid of the fruit flies in my house once. You need to be sure to then put the vac outside or they all escape and you get to do it again (voice of experience LOL). I had yellow jackets as well as fire ants in my front (and back) yard, when I had one, here. I used poison. Your method sounds much more environmentally friendly.
ROACHES!!! We have had two rental properties infested by renters who brought them in. It takes at least six months of professional strength treatment to get rid of them. They are so fast you can’t catch to squash even one, multiply exponentially, eggs survive for months before hatching, can even hatch from dead mothers. Nasty critters!
@dyounghbic I’d agree. Took me 11 mo to get rid of the roaches when I initially moved into this apt. The first night I put out a sticky sheet just to see at what level the problem was. Not happy in the morning as I caught 40 something of them, both young and old.
Now with the foundation work going on they are back. The bulk those of us have at our end of the building are German roaches although for the first time I have a few American cockroaches (they probably came in under the door as I see dead ones in the hall; I attach a lower door rubber thing but the seal of the door against the rug isn’t perfect). This place only has the company come once every 10 or so weeks to deal with the roaches which isn’t even close to frequently enough to deal with the issue. I finally broke down and bought combat and sticky pads about 6 or 7 months ago. Finally not catching very many. Ironically this Thursday the company will be doing my half (they do 1/2 a floor a week). I am going to swap out my many roaches pad with the ones with few so they put enough poison in here.
These two photos are of a 3.5 week collection (saving them for the exterminator company).
This photo is what I have collected in 4.5 days - much better (the other ones are empty) so finally making major headway.
By the way the Terro stickies are really crappy. Catchmaster is better but the a brand. The best is the more rectangular one Pest Pro but I can’t find them right now. (not to mention pest pro sticks way better to cat paws too).
In my opinion the worse bugs are the ones that are inside of where I live rather than those that live only outside of where I live.
I cannot stand ticks! If I get on on me they’ll hear me scream in the next county over.