When summer comes, the insects wake up—and so do you. You lie in bed and listen to their high-pitched drones, trying to slide deeper under the covers and protecting your head with the sheet. This muffles the sound, but mosquitoes are no fools. They linger, waiting for you to wriggle, so the sheet falls away. If you sleep alone, then it is single combat. Otherwise you wonder why they always seem to prefer you to your partner, or do they? Maybe they hunt in couples, or even packs. Either way, how do you persuade them that your mate is tastier. By morning, you will have two itchy bites, one on your hand and one on your face or neck. Why only two? Surely there should be more. There is so much of you available and, if there are two of you in bed, there is enough flesh to satisfy a herd. In half-sleep, a disturbing image from the film Apocalypse Now often comes to mind: a fleet of helicopters zooming in to attack. Time to get out of bed and search for last year’s insect repellent machine. Can’t find it, and where is the little bottle? Mental note: buy them yet again and remember to switch on before bedtime.
Wings
This year, there are lots of little black flies with transparent wings. They are too early for flying ants, so I sent a photo to AI. Apparently they are called drain flies and are said not to bite, but can I be sure? They seem to prefer the bathroom, but come out and fuss about me while I am reading, so I zap them with insecticide just in case. Then I feel a brief pang of guilt: what if they are some re-incarnated old friends? Maybe if I had corralled them all out of the window, they would have given the circling swifts a swift breakfast. This is one of the problems of ecology. Everything is part of the food chain, so you have to take sides. A few days ago, there was a dawn chorus, louder and more joyous than I have heard for years. I sent a message to a friend, asking whether birds are perhaps on the rise. She replied that it all depends on your outlook: garden half full because there are more songbirds or half empty with no nightingales, orioles or fireflies.
Stings
Will this year see fewer wasps as well? Last year, I was only stung twice until I put my hand into a large nest inside the window shutters. Fair enough, I thought, once the pain subsided, as I was reminded of a man arrested for climbing into Buckingham Palace. I, too, was invading their home and threatening the “queen”. All the same, having sprayed the nest to extinction, the queen was dead, which meant fewer wasplets and less competition for my prosciutto e melone. If you want to tell the difference between a queen wasp and male workers and drones, the queens are bigger and arrive earlier to start a new nest as they are the only ones to survive the winter. Hornets are bigger still. When they built a nest in my chimney, you could hardly sleep for the buzzing. Eventually the fire brigade came at midnight to destroy it. Hornets do not stay out at night, so they were all tucked up in bed ready for death when the firefighters called. People are terrified of hornets, but there really is no need. They do not want to eat your food, are gentle and peace-loving, and not annoying at all, unless you annoy them. All the same, there were guests coming to stay and that was my excuse for the slaughter. I used to think that the only good wasp was a dead wasp, but now I see this idea needs deeper thought. It all depends on your wasp. The hardworking Potter wasp makes containers out of mud, like tiny amphora, arranged in orderly rows along my window frames. Inside are its eggs and some paralysed spiders for the larvae to eat for breakfast when they wake up. The Jewel wasp does the same with paralysed cockroaches. These solitary wasps are far too busy to annoy you, and more wasps means fewer spiders and fewer cockroaches. If you agree with me that the world has more cockroaches than it really needs, then celebrate these specialised parasitic wasps.
Bites
What has all this to do with readers of The Florentine? Quite a lot, as a surprising survey revealed that Tuscany is the most insect-phobic part of Italy as judged by hospital visits for insect bites and disinfestation call-outs. All regions list mosquitoes as the premier pest with spiders and cockroaches not far behind. No surprise then that spiders have Italian place names. The most dangerous is the Tarantula, named after Taranto, while the largest spider whose green fangs give the most painful bite is called Segestria Fiorentina. Perhaps this explains the way in which a Florentine friend behaved when she noticed some painful itchy lumps that took weeks to go away. This happened in August at a house by the sea. She showed her lumps to everyone she knew and received plenty of advice. After the usual antihistamines and hydrocortisone creams came the idea of keeping a bite diary to see if it always happened in the same bed. If so, then try sleeping on the other side of the bed, or better still change to another bed and, if that doesn’t work, try changing your bed partner. I helped her to change the sheets. We inspected the duvet and the folds in the valance where bedbugs sometimes live, but found nothing. We sprayed the bed and all the bedclothes, emptying two expensive cans of insecticide. No help.
She researched widely and began to suspect acari. My suggestion is that you do not research acari. If you do, you will find that, apart from the mites and ticks that you already know about, especially if you have a dog, there are lots more all around you that you cannot see. The tiniest give you allergies, the medium ones give you Lyme disease or encephalitis, and the woodworm mite can indeed give you painful itchy lumps. Professionals were called and they fumigated the whole house, telling her to leave it unoccupied for two weeks. Presumably the chemical might kill humans too. It was clear on reopening the house that it had not been unoccupied as there were plenty of corpses to remove: insects, arachnids, but no mammals. Maybe after this the lumps were fewer, but by then it was autumn and she had moved back to Firenze. Many of us who live in old houses with old furniture have woodworm as companions without knowing them. Maybe it is better that way. They sleep in winter and very seldom bite. It has become clear to me that researching acari is bad for your health.
Medical footnote + trigger warning
Insects, ticks and spiders can kill you in at least 20 different ways with over a half a million deaths per year from malaria alone. However, in countries such as Italy with good public health measures serious illnesses are very rare. When the details are frightening and the risk very low, it may be better not to be too well informed. So, perhaps, on reflection, it would be better if you do not read this article.
