THE MENACE OF MANITOBA.
It’s not biblical, just another ‘odd’ year
Legions of multi-coloured Asian lady beetles are inching their way into homes in Manitoba this month, looking for somewhere warm to spend the winter. They are most unwelcome, however, on account of the smell.
The lady beetles — impostors of the kindly Ladybug — can make themselves bleed a foul-smelling blood, which makes them unappetizing to predators and loathed by Manitoba homeowners.
They also bite. Or rather, they taste.
“Insects will kind of taste what they’re on,” University of Manitoba entomology instructor Jordan Bannerman said. “If they’re crawling on your skin, they may kind of nip at you a little bit.”
The lady beetles are the latest in a string of bug-related phenomena to visit Manitoba this year. CBC reporter Bartley Kives joked on Twitter last week that Winnipeg had been beset by six different plagues: three kinds of caterpillar, the soybean aphid, yellowjackets and the lady beetles.
Entomologists told of tree branches teeming with thousands of forest tent caterpillars, of buildings marked by hundreds of inch-long silk cocoons, of entire stands of trees without leaves in the middle of summer. But the situation is far from biblical. In fact, it’s altogether normal for Manitoba. If the summer had passed without some kind of bug-related curiosity, that would be far more noteworthy.
“It’s been an odd year,” Amy Cleland, nursery manager at Winnipeg’s Lacoste Garden Centre, said. “But it’s an odd year every year.”
This particular odd year started in the spring with the caterpillars. In general, caterpillars go through cycles. Their population spikes, then goes dormant for a number of years after parasites and viruses crash the population, before spiking again. They can stay dormant for 10 to 15 years. This year, three species of caterpillar (the forest tent caterpillar, the spanworm and the cankerworm) had outbreaks at the same time — which scientists said was exceptional.
In St. Lazare, resident Haley Blouin told CBC News in June that she was clearing forest tent caterpillars from her property with a shovel, filling buckets and burying them. Her husband tried pouring gas and burning them.
In Brandon, local garden club president Bill Sutherland said one of his members in the north end of the city reported a sidewalk so covered in caterpillars it looked like it was moving.
“It was a carpet of caterpillars,” he said. “They’re all over the place. They’re all on the walls and everything else.” The caterpillars chew the leaves off trees. But at his home in west Brandon, Sutherland “didn’t really notice that much.”
The most surprising thing this year was the disappearance of the swarms of mosquitoes that have become infamous in Manitoba. Low rainwater in the spring meant the pools that mosquitoes used to breed weren’t available.
In Manitoba’s agricultural sphere — which is perennially dealing with an abundance of one pest or another — the outbreak of soybean aphid was the predominant concern.
“We had an amazing summer,” said Kateryn Rochon, an entomologist at the University of Manitoba.
“It seems with the rest of Canada, the summer sucked. We just had all the goodness. … That was good for plants and that was good for insects.”
The aphid outbreak led to the success of their predators, namely the Asian lady beetle — which was introduced in North America more than a century ago to control aphid populations. “They’re looking for a place to overwinter,” Rochon said. “So now people notice, ‘Oh, there’s lady beetles everywhere.’ ”
“It’s not abnormal,” she said. “If you ask an entomologist, no. Absolutely not apocalyptic. If you ask people who don’t like insects and they have to deal with them, this year was particularly difficult because there were lots of them. But we’re not record-breaking here. It’s not biblical in anyway.”
“I love it here,” she said. “It’s — in a very loving way — the land of pestilence.”
IT WAS A CARPET OF CATERPILLARS. ... THEY’RE ALL ON THE WALLS AND EVERYTHING ELSE.