Ladybug

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Dave Bonta

A ladybug circumnavigates the rim of a glass house for dead insects — longhorns, scarabs, a stag beetle, a rhinoceros beetle, each at least as big as a finger, if not a fat thumb, & shiny as gemstones. The ladybug is a small red capsule: potent medicine. Her dogged way of walking suggests a certain brittleness, a gift for sudden, unprovoked rage. She goes around the case once, twice, then doubles back and tries it counter-clockwise. The wooden rim is wide enough for two ladybugs to pass each other without touching, as sometimes happens, though not this particular afternoon. She’s alone. Outside, it’s October in all the colors of her tribe. She raises her elytra & lifts off on wings veined like translucent leaves, which carry her up the ceiling as if trying to fly back to their crystal tree.

About Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with one quadrillion of his closest microbial friends --- a tight-knit, symbiotic community comprising some 500 different species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa.
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6 Responses to Ladybug

  1. Jo says:
    October 21, 2008 at 5:06 am

    Don’t shoot me but there’s a typo: shiny as gemstones or a gemstone? Funny, I’ve just been writing about gems too but not as ladybugs. I love ladybugs, they are probably the only insect I really embrace…..oh and crickets. I know, I’m such a girlie. But great writing.

  2. Dave says:
    October 21, 2008 at 9:43 am

    Oh, thanks for the typo catch!

    I think you would like most of the beetles in this case. Beetles tend to be charismatic (if not always as cute as ladybugs) with the exception of rove beetles, which are kind of creepy.

  3. ..deb says:
    October 21, 2008 at 10:36 am

    Good sense of a ladybug in the fall, caught in the warmth of a house.

    We’ve had them swarm inside, before weatherproofing our house a little better. They are strange in swarm, slow and deliberate. I always felt bad tossing them outside.

  4. Dave says:
    October 21, 2008 at 1:57 pm

    Yes, the species I was writing about here, the Halloween ladybug, is so named because of the approximate time of its massing indoors in the northeast U.S., where it’s an alien invasive species. We’ve had them by the thousands in years past, but last year their numbers are way down, and we’re hoping that’s the case again year – for one thing because many native ladybug species have disappeared, having been out-competed by the invaders.

  5. Lucy says:
    October 22, 2008 at 9:02 am

    Fly away home!

    they never lose their magic, do they?

  6. Dave says:
    October 22, 2008 at 10:04 am

    No, though on bad outbreak years, I do take the magic wand of the vaccuum cleaner to them without any compunction.