The Adventures of Courtney and Arthur: Bugs 2

We posted the other day about bugs. It turns out we jumped the gun. The rains have come and it rained hard for two days. By the second night it had let up and it was nice and cool out. We were under our net reading enjoying an rare night of electricity when we started to hear an unusual number of bugs in the room. Courtney got up to investigate. She walked into the other room where we had left the front door open, which turned out to be a big mistake. She came running back into the bedroom because the “dinning” room was filled with flying bugs! They were pouring in the door, hitting the windows madly, and coming in through any hole they could find. We proceeded to run around the house to shut all doors, turn off all lights, and kill all the bugs by hitting them with a shoe. We now have red shoe prints and dead bugs all over our walls, but it did the trick.

After the rains these bugs, which look like ants with 1 inch wings, come crawling out of the ground. We think they are some kind of termite. They all hatch at once and fill the air. The air is so thick with them with them that there is one almost every three feet. If you can get over the fact that they are bugs it is kind of pretty as long, as they aren’t in your house.

The next morning when we got up the ground was covered in their wings. We are not sure if they got eaten and the wings are left behind, they had finished their life span already and died, or they shed their wings. For some reason the wings are all in piles around the base of trees and buildings (as you can see in the picture). When we went for a walk that morning we found 10 of the local kids around the community center building with pots. They were eagerly collecting the bugs to eat! As you can see from the picture they do not look that appetizing but we hear that they are high in vitamin A and protein. We have yet to try them. The bugs here keep us on our toes and are every changing.

Wings at the bottom of a tree