Summer is here

Summer is officially here.

How do I know? Especially as neither June 22nd or May 24th (the ‘official’ start of summer in Bermuda) hasn’t arrived?

Well, I woke up to ants all over my kitchen.

For anyone living in civilized countries, i.e. the US or Canada, the thought of bugs of any kind living along side of you is, well, enough to give you nightmares. In fact, for most of you, just seeing one little bug in your house will probably give you reason to call an exterminator. But on an island, bugs are a part of life.

In fact, I don’t often disturb some of the spiders we find tucked up in the ceiling corners as they’re supposed to get rid of some of the bad bugs, but I always try to get those nasty cockroaches when they appear – and of course they’ll appear more and more now that summer is here and they seem get through the screen door on my sliding glass door, no matter what you do.

I even find churchworms and caterpillars – my son and I rescued three caterpillars, and as a sort-of science project, put them in a jar. One died, but two managed to cocoon themselves and emerge as… moths, of course… We made a mini event of letting them go, too.

But, back to the ants… They are (I would say the single, but, in reality they number in the millions) the most irritating pest in Bermuda, even more so than mosquitoes that leave me itching for weeks on end.

You see, Bermuda is really a giant ant hill. They probably outnumber the people by a trillion to one, if not more (we have a population of about 65,000), and they certainly act like they own this little piece of rock in the middle of the Atlantic.

Fine, they can have Bermuda – as long as they leave my jar of peanut butter alone.