Once in a while, an insect gets into the house. OK, maybe it's more like once a day... at least, in the warm weather, if you live in some climate like we have here in Nova Scotia, Canada. But you don't expect a crane fly to drop by in March. Not to mention half a dozen or more to appear in your apartment, while the blizzards linger on and on outside. (I don't need to say more about this past winter!)
So, where did these critters keep coming from? After a week of kicking one of these flying daddy-long-legs out, only to be replaced by another, I started looking for the source... in our apartment.
I'd had experience with this sort of thing before - I'll tell you momentarily - so I started looking at the larger plant pots. Such as the one above, with my Crapemyrtle in it (Lagerstroemea indica). Yes, sure enough, here was the source of the crane flies. Newly hatched from the earth. See the shells of three individuals, half sticking out of the potting soil here?
This plant spends six months of the year outdoors, and some enterprising fly planted her eggs in the lovely soil. In the relative warmth of the indoors this winter, the young grew up ahead of schedule, recently surfaced, and 'hatched' into their adult form.
Anyone else had this kind of experience? And I know it is not just the crane fly that will do this. Three years ago, I had a flock of tiny wasps arise from the colourful clusters of multiflora rose hips I'd brought in to brighten the house for the winter. As the hips dried up, the tiny wasps hatched. I think the rose hip nearest the dime in this photo was one with the end eaten out by a wasp or two, escaping.
Yeah, these wasps are tiny. Note the next photo. Poor things had expired, as you can see. And I thought, if I got a dozen of these from of a few bunches of hips, I wondered how many millions of these wasps actually hatch each spring in my town, which grows in every abandoned spot with Rosa multiflora. Then again, perhaps a big proportion of wasp larvae or pupae get eaten with the rose hips, as the waxwings and other birds feast on them in the winter.
I would never have seen these creatures, had not these few appeared in my windowsills.
The funny thing is, I did know this species of wasp (though I have not stopped to try to identify and have a name for it).
[OK... so, in this wonderful age of the internet, the briefest of searches gives me the hint these might be the Multiflora Rose Seed Chalcid, Megastigmus aculeatus var. nigroflavus. Read some of their interesting details here. Sounds like there is some hope that this tiny creature may help control the extreme weedy tendency of this Rose, though the presence of the wasp here does not seem to be hindering this shrub's rampant growth locally.]
As I started to say... I'd seen these tiny wasps before. I had the same experience once in the 1990s with these tiny insects. They had mysteriously appeared in my apartment... which I had adorned at Christmas with clumps of small rose hips, tied with ribbon, hanging on the walls.
What I found my most unusual such visitor, 'forced' early into springtime life, like some bright branch of forsythia, were the grasshoppers. Yes, very tiny grasshoppers appeared on a windowsill at our house in March of 2011. Again, pots of plants that spend the summer outdoors were there in the light, and the tiny jumping insects appeared.
I had never laid eyes on grasshoppers so small. The poor things did not have a chance. Indoors was not a good habitat, despite the many house-plants. And the weather outdoors in mid March here is not the best for hungry babies just hatched from the earth plant-pot.
I'm sure, as the years go on, some new species will show themselves, haplessly coming on the scene early indoors. Never intentional, always interesting, this all goes to show how much insect activity is going on just under our noses, all the time.
Again, I'm curious. Has anyone else out there inadvertently 'forced' some insects into appearing?
