We've had LOTS of fun discovering the wide variety of bugs in our area simply by looking around, you can't miss them. There are so many, that I often (weekly?) see a kind of bug I've never seen before! Seriously.
Most of the bugs that live inside our house I consider pests. Ants, centipedes, mosquitoes, flies, weevils, cockroaches and woodboring beetles are all particularly pesky pests. Non-scary looking spiders are the one exception... they have a job to do, you know. Scary spiders are those with bulky limbs or that are hairy or larger than I feel is reasonable; obviously, scary is a relative term.
Though I try to control these pests with natural products, we do have to fumigate semi-regularly to ward off complete infestation, like that we are experiencing currently since we have yet to fumigate our new house for the first time!
However, while we wait to get in touch with the bug busters, we've taken the opportunity to look and study some of our houseguests. The most annoying of which at the moment is the woodboring beetle. It eats wood. It destroys wood furniture and as I've just discovered, it will eat books too!
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!
This of course will not do.
The only thing we have in common is that of devouring books. However, as a responsible person, I like to leave the book in as close to the original state as possible, you know, thinking of he that reads after me. I found one cursed creature that had made it halfway through 'Science in a Supermarket' and I found the corpse of one who'd died after having eaten through 'Getting Started with Latin' twice! No wonder. Urgh.
Since we caught the one red handed, we made a study of him before we killed him. Yep. I killed him. I let him starve to death on the observation plate. He was stuck on his back and could not get up. I don't even feel bad about it. So there.
Some observations:
Looks like a baby termite.
He has a brown beak.
They have antennae-like mouth parts.
Cream colored.
Six legs.
3-4mm long.
Sometimes you can hear them chomping the wood inside the bookshelf. Yuck.
They tunnel through the wood leaving behind little round sawdust bits (poop?).
The tunnels don't appear on the outside, but you have only touch the wood to feel it cave in under your fingertips.
Now to sketch him. :)
Oh yeah.
Might you have insect pests around that you could study before you eliminate them?
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