We moved to the country 25 years ago. First summer, driving home after dark, my wife said "What's all those lights?" About 1B fireflies were flashing over a hayfield.
"Fireflies!"
"No, really! Fireflies are made up!"
See, she grew up in the desert and thought stories about fireflies were in with fairies and elves.
Anyway, haven't seen that again since. Now I know why.
> See, she grew up in the desert and thought stories about fireflies were in with fairies and elves.
It's always cool when people visit us in the summer who have lived on the west coast their entire lives. Their first impressions of fireflies, as adults, is fun to watch.
We hosted an exchange student from China, who had spent his entire life in a major city, and he expected fireflies to be hot to the touch. I still get a lot of them in my yard, but I also don't treat my lawn with anything other than what falls from the sky.
The active ingredient here is bifenthrin, which has been (mostly) banned in the EU since 2019. This product is marketed for killing those "unsavory" bugs and promoting plant growth, but it is also extremely lethal to bees.
I'm sure that my neighbors dislike the clover in my yard, but I've got bees buzzing about over here and they have a pristine-but-sterile landscape.
In the northeast many people are terrified of ticks, and they go scorched earth genocide trying to keep them away with neurotoxins.
It doesn't stop the ticks, they are extremely resilient and don't use lawns as their primary habitat. It does massive damage to the local insect population though.
Also, DEET is a lot less nasty than most people think, and very effective without destroying the ecosystem.
For ants. Extremely polluting for water. If you take the non-lawn product right next to it, the label says (European here): “Don’t spread on lawns, in places accessible to animals or children, in places where it will be drained to common water, only spread on the concrete in front of the house where the rain doesn’t reach, in quantities (5g per meter)”. And they give you a 2kg bottle. So I guess the lawn product is quite bad too, albeit slightly better.
We have a large lawn around our house and from spring to fall the “pest pressure” (for lack of a better term) is intense. All kinds of beetles, ants, cockroaches, spiders, mosquitos and other flying bugs constantly get in our house and make it almost impossible to enjoy the outdoors. I have thought about trying to poison but it somehow seems wrong, plus I’m concerned about our herb garden.
Diatomaceous earth works very well for the crawling insects. Not so much for the ones that fly, of course.
It's kind of a horrible way to go, for a bug, in that it's a mechanical insecticide and it's like us walking on broken glass. Ants will walk to the line, touch it, and then immediately turn around. I puff it around the perimeter of my house and it keeps any crawling insect at bay until it rains again. If you can puff it under baseboards it will stay dry in there for ages.
It's non-toxic, but you probably don't want to breathe in the dust. That applies to all fine particles, though.
They actually have these confluence events where they mate and likely this is what you saw (if the counts were that high). I've seen their numbers wax and wane in my yard and beyond. That said, I don't denounce the research; just feel that these bugs don't always have the same population size year over year that someone could casually notice their decline.
I still see them every year. The absolute number seems to wax and wane, but I think their peak is pretty short, like a day or two, so if you don’t time it juuuuuust right, you aren’t going to see as much.
But take that with a grain of salt, it’s not like I’ve done research here, that’s just my feel. And I’m pretty sure the big fields I see them in regularly don’t get hit with pesticides.
"Fireflies!"
"No, really! Fireflies are made up!"
See, she grew up in the desert and thought stories about fireflies were in with fairies and elves.
Anyway, haven't seen that again since. Now I know why.