The war against the stink bug

Newsletter 17: January 18, 2025

I’ve been sitting at my desk for the last half hour, hands hovering over the keyboard, not sure where to begin or why I’m wanting to write a post.

I could be out in the garden. It’s a warm summer morning and there’s lots of pleasurably pottering I could be doing: sweeping the paths, trimming the shrubs, spreading coffee grounds under the lemon tree, or – the greatest joy – turning the compost heap which will be heaving with worms and would send up clouds of warm steam after the soaking it’s recently had.

I could be using the time to train Clancy, our adolescent dog. He needs training. He’s lively and an infectious character. But he barked aggressively at my granddaughter a couple of days ago and still lunges at cyclists and walkers on public paths.

I could be pushing on with the draft of the novel I’ve been writing, on and off, over the past couple of years. I wrote in my last newsletter about the character of Cynthia, had splendid feedback from my American friend Karen, and feel good about where it’s heading.

I could edit and publish the third chapter of my PhD thesis. The first two chapters are here in the Mating with the World section. Last week I posted Chapter 2: Feeling Useless. It’s salutary for me to see what has changed about the way I experience the world, and what patterns persist.

Or I could curl up with the extraordinary novel I’m reading – Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Man in Love – and continue to feel awestruck by his writing and appalled by his ethics.

But I want to write a post.

In my last post I quoted Karl Ove Knausgaard as follows:

Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim.

I want to keep pushing myself in that direction.

Today’s attempt will be about my battle with the citrus trees’ stink bug plague.

*****

The vibrant green leaves in the photo above belong to our two citrus trees. One lemon, one lime. These trees have been the object of my intense focus for the past two or three months.

Every year they are inundated with stink bugs. Tiny and green when they’re young. Then they turn orange. By the end of the season they’re big and black and have developed wings.

But at first, in the late spring or early summer, there are just the tiny green bugs, hard to spot against the green leaves. But you sense their presence. There’s a distinctive smell when they’re around.

I started early this year. Or I thought it was early. But once I’d donned white latex gloves and face mask, filled my bucket of boiling soapy water and lugged the ladder to a level spot between the two trees, I realised that once again I’d let them get a hold. There were a few orange bugs visible on the outer leaves, quickly picked off and dispatched, but when I delved a little deeper, I saw scores of tiny green and bigger orange bugs. I groped around, grabbing some of the bigger ones and drowning them in my bucket, squashing the tiny green ones between thumb and forefinger. But it was obvious that many were escaping.

Every couple of days I’d repeat the routine. At the end of each raid, I’d be left with scores of orange corpses floating in my bucket, and the finger and thumb of my right hand stained orange, despite the gloves. I’d then spend ten or more minutes in the bathroom, scrubbing away the stain with soap and pumice stone.

And when I returned for the next attempt, there were more bugs, not fewer. By now some of them were fully grown: black, winged and with stronger defences in the form of a visible jet of foul smelling liquid aimed, when threatened, in my direction.

This was all too familiar. I’d tackled the task in previous years in exactly this way and had never succeeded in eliminating the bugs.

Then, a few weeks before Christmas, I brought out a new weapon. The vacuum cleaner. I donned my battle gear – thick impenetrable industrial rubber gloves this time – along with sun glasses, face mask, hat and long sleeves. A neighbour looking over the fence might have smirked; I felt determined and focussed.

The first orange bug was easily spotted. It sat on a green leaf well within easy reach. I turned on the vacuum cleaner and slowly positioned the cleaner head over the bug. There was a sudden suck and knock as the bug was pulled into the head, and then a faint rattle as it hurtled down the tubing and into the dust bag.

The next ten minutes were relatively easy. There were orange and green stink bugs clearly visible, sometimes stationary on a leaf as if enjoying the sun, sometimes apparently grazing or sucking moisture from a stem or small fruit. I kept hoovering them up, sometimes one at a time, sometimes two or more in a single suck. If a bigger orange bug scurried off before I could position the cleaner head, I’d curse, sometimes audibly. But few of these escaped.

It was time, then, to delve deeper.

Still on the second rung of the ladder, I leant in and parted some of the branches so that I could have access to the trunk and inner network. I could now see orange bugs making their way along central branches towards the outer leaves, for all the world looking like commuters on the way to work. I hoovered them up, sometimes having to chase a threatened bug that scurried away to the side of the branch away from the head. Occasionally one would escape. Mostly I got them. I felt I was winning the war.

Then, at an inner junction, low down and near the centre of the lime tree, I saw what appeared to be a base or home. A cluster of tiny green bugs – there must have been more than a dozen of them, maybe even twenty – sat stationary (had they recently hatched, perhaps?), while three or four orange bugs, one already darker than the others, moved slowly amongst them, like guardians.

I hoovered them all up.

But I was aware of a new feeling; a momentary guilt. There was a new thought too; I had read about campaigns like this in history books, novels. What was this like for them? Do bugs feel fear? Pain?

The feeling, the thought, both were fleeting. There was more that had to be done. Many more bugs to eliminate before I’d successfully cleansed the trees.

But the feeling returned when, after a second day of this new phase of the campaign, when I opened the case of the vacuum cleaner to empty the bag. I found, at the outside of the exposed bag, a live orange bug. Presumably it had made its way overnight from the inside of the bag. Were there other bugs still alive in the bag, I wondered, struggling in the dark to find a way out? I filled a bucket with boiling water and submerged the bag for a full minute.

The next day, and almost every day for the next month, I was out at the trees again in my gear and with the same routine. The numbers of bugs dwindled and it became possible, after a while, to dispense with the vacuum cleaner. Instead I’d take my bucket of hot soapy water, climb the ladder, grab the bugs with my gloved hand – a few still orange, but now mostly black, occasionally two joined together and mating – and fling them into the bucket. There’d be a brief desperate attempt to swim, but it wouldn’t last long.

The two trees are now bug free.

I won’t find out till next year if any have managed to lay eggs.

I go out several times each day to admire them, the lemon and the lime.

There are new fruits on both – shiny green healthy fruits. It won’t be long before one is ripe enough to pick.