EWW!

In the fall before winter hit, I saw one of these little bugs outside my house. It seemed harmless enough, so I let it be.


Fast forward to this Sunday… It is a beautiful spring-like day, so I decide to go out and walk around the neighborhood. In our house, we very rarely go out the front door because the garage is on the back of our house and we usually leave that way. I decided to leave the house through the front door for a change. As soon as I opened it a few of these little bugs started crawling into the house. I shut the door quickly and tried to figure out a way to get rid of these terrible little bugs crawling around on my floor. I was going to get a dust pan, but then I had a great idea and ran to get my trusty Black & Decker hand vac that Doug got me for Christmas. I sucked up the few unlucky critters that had wandered into my house.

I then got a little zealous and decided that since it worked so well I would go for the rest that were on my front door. I quickly jumped outside and shut the door behind me with vacuum in hand. Focusing on the little section of my door, I unmercifully went to work sucking up about 15-20 of the little bugs. The noise of the vacuum cleaner had startled many of them and they started flying away. I was being swarmed by these bugs so I jumped back off the stoop and stared in horror at my home. There were hundreds, THOUSANDS of these little bugs stuck to the front of the house. I gave up on my little endeavor to exterminate them because I was so overwhelmed.

I called Doug up right away and he told me to (1) CALM DOWN (2) Exterminators are really expensive and we should try to do something ourselves before resorting to that. (I’ll let him use my hand vac.) And (3) Do the neighbors have them on their houses?

I walked down the sidewalk and the next four newly built houses on the block have the same issue that our house does. Our neighbors on the other side that have been there for almost 2 years now and they didn’t have any bugs on their house. I’m going to ask them if they had similar issues and what they did about them.

I had to empty out the vacuum cleaner in the front yard because many of them had survived the initial suck. Once again, EWWW! I usually don’t get all freaked out with bugs, but the sheer amount of them and the fact that they were on my house was the thing that freaked me out.

Starting far away from the house and zooming in...

Notice the 2 bushes on the right that they've taken out!

They're everywhere!

Eww!

Trying to look at the positive side... Um, at least they’re not on the inside.

My visiting teaching companion lives on the other side of our neighborhood and she hired an exterminator for something else a while back. They required her to get a year long contract. She told me they barely did anything and getting rid of the services is as bad as trying to get rid of a cell phone plan.

If anyone knows what these beetle-like creatures are and how to eradicate them from my home, PLEASE let me know.