Story by Thomas Fuller.
Manatee County shares a special blessing with most other Florida counties, that being the semi-annual appearance of those amorous insects commonly called “love bugs.” I remember my first encounter with the romantically consumed creatures back in the fall of 1990, as a recent transplant from Ohio. And no, I am not a Yankee. I’m from southern Ohio.
Anyway, I distinctly recall tooling down I75 in my Ford van, and suddenly finding myself in the middle of what seemed like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. As my windshield became peppered with a million little black blobs, instinctively I engaged the wipers. Big mistake. I didn’t panic. I pushed the wiper fluid lever. No wiper fluid. Now I panicked. What was just moments ago a perfectly functional windshield had become an opaque wall that looked like slimy oatmeal filled with a whole bunch of tiny wings and legs. I managed to exit the highway without killing someone and ended up attempting to remove the “love scum” by scraping it off with a credit card. It didn’t take me very long to learn all about love bugs. If left on too long, the squished bug bombs would take the paint off your car. They showed up around May and September but only lived for a couple of weeks, dying off after their strange mating ritual was completed. They didn’t bite or sting, and nothing would eat them. They seemed to be attracted to car fumes and the color white. And most puzzling to me, they didn’t seem to be around before the 1970’s.
What a mystery! Where on earth did they come from? Well, I got the answer in short order. Entomologists in labs at the University of Florida in Gainesville were working on developing a variety of insect that would eat mosquitoes and not be detrimental to the environment. Before they reached success, a colony of the insects escaped. And there you have it. Mystery solved. It sounded very reasonable to me. After all, isn’t that how we got killer bees? I heard that explanation many times, and I shared it with others myself. There’s only one snag in the laboratory thing. It’s totally false. It never happened. Love bugs, while not native to our beautiful state, migrated here from Central America over the course of many years. Now sometimes solved mysteries are kind of a let-down. But this story’s greatest mystery is yet to be solved. Who on earth is responsible for creating this tall tale about scientists and laboratories and escaping insects? Try as I might, I haven’t been able to find anyone who claims to have started it or anyone who has a suspicion about who did. Whoever it is, they need to be acknowledged for propagating one of the greatest hoaxes in American history.
It remains to this day widely accepted as truth. We know where love bugs come from, but at this point it’s unlikely that we will ever know the origins of this myth. Let me leave you with just a couple things. First, love bugs are beneficial, contributing to the decomposition of organic material, and as effective pollinators. Secondly, don’t use dryer sheets to clean them off your car. That, too, is a myth, and they will scratch the finish.
