Love Bugs

How can an insect with such a sweet name be anything but sweet?  And they’re kinda cute, too!

                                    

But I never saw them all sweet and cute sitting in a bed of flowers.  I only saw them like this:

                                   

And they were usually in flight, mating.  And they were in flight, mating, by the hundreds of thousands.  I was introduced to the “love bug” when I spent a week down in Pine, Louisiana with my church after Hurricane Katrina hit.  These bugs were everywhere.  Clouds of them.  They actually affected visibility they were so thick.  And they were attracted to white surfaces.  Here’s what we dealt with:

                 

 

The locals said there’s two seasons for these bugs.  And we were there in the middle of one of them.  Only they (the locals) said they’d never seen them this bad.  The upside?  They didn’t sting or bite.

Don’t look for Pine on the map.  It rarely makes it.  But here’s where it is:

(In the bigger circle at the top.  The large body of water pictured is Lake Pontchartrain.  Sorry about the poor quality!)

                                 

Just how do you get there?  You follow the signs:

                                

Perhaps in the future I’ll share more about what we did while we were there, but love bugs are on my mind today.