bugs — blog — Anne Benvenuti

Posts tagged bugs

On Bugs, Generally Speaking

It’s been almost two months since I promised to start writing about bugs. It’s not that I haven’t been spending time with them; I have! The problem is that in my new life as an organic farmer, I don’t have time to write during May and June, and other months as well. . . because I’ve got weeds that grow shoulder high in one field during the time it takes to clear another field. This reality causes me to recall with some longing the use of herbicides: how easy, how convenient. But I’ve left that behind, along with many other easy and convenient things.

The fact that I am out weeding manually almost every day instead of spraying poison means I am also spending time with bugs. It even means I begin to notice a relationship between the weeds and the bugs and me, though I do not yet understand what I notice.

animal family, critical thinking, human-animal relations, ecospiritualityAnne BenvenutiJuly 18, 2018bugs, herbicides, organic farm, human-animal relations, snails, science, curiosity, weeds, honey bees, monarch butterflyComment

Ants and Mosquitoes and Ticks, oh my!

This morning I stepped barefoot across the stone floor, moving out of the bedroom to greet the new day, and what did my wandering feet behold? A small pile of grit in the doorway, grit that wasn't there when I went to bed. I looked up to see a new hole in my star-vault stone ceiling, a hole made by ants chomping through the stones. I didn't actually see any ants this morning, but I saw them last summer, marching across the ceiling and chewing the stone, and far too frequently falling into bed with me! No one told me about this when I expressed my romantic fantasy of living in an old European stone farmhouse. And this morning I wonder why there is a "yuck factor" to ants falling into my bed that I don't feel when my three little dogs burrow between the sheets!