Bugs bugging you? Warm winter weather is to blame

Both good, bad bugs out earlier this spring

It’s that time of year when all those pesky flies and insects bug the daylights out of you.

Sometimes their numbers can be overwhelming.

But are there more of these pests than usual?

A Virginian-Pilot reader thought there were and reached out to the paper’s Glad You Asked initiative for answers.

It’s simple, really. There aren’t more bugs than usual. But, thanks to a milder winter, the annoyances came out earlier this spring making it seem like there were.

“Aside from that, it’s not any worse than usual,” said Virginia Tech professor Peter Schultz, an entomologist at the Hampton Roads Agricultural Research and Extension Center. “And while that is good for the beneficial insects, it also means that the bad guys came out earlier as well.”

And we’re not just talking about mosquitoes.

A variety of flies and insects bother us every year: wasps, hornets, yellow jackets, aphids, ticks, fleas, house flies, May flies, any number of spiders and moths — and that’s just getting the list started.

Virginia, like most places, is home to a huge variety of creepy crawlies and divebombing biters.

But not all of them are pests. Take, for instance, ladybugs. They like to eat the larvae of many of the problem bugs that destroy crops.

“We’re seeing a lot more ladybugs right now,” Schultz said. “They’re benefiting from the milder winter.”

How about dragonflies? They eat quite a few mosquitoes in their lifetime.

With most flies and bugs already out doing their thing, is there anything on the horizon to be concerned with?

“It’s about time for Japanese beetles to start showing up,” Schultz said.

While not a problem in their namesake country because of natural predators, Japanese beetles are a huge problem in the United States — where they are known to feast on about 300 different plants including vegetable crops.