February 1, 2011
For years I’ve been sharing indoor space with convergent lady beetles, but until a Mother Earth News reader in Pennsylvania asked about them, I had not known that the shield bugs who have moved into my house are brown marmorated stink bugs. I recently covered the journalistic basics in Seen Any Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs Lately? at MotherEarthNews.com. Here I shall address the private side of having stink bugs in my house. Lots of them.
Convergent lady beetles generally cluster in corners and keep to themselves. By comparison brown marmorated stink bugs are great travelers, prone to short-distance flying across rooms to land in one’s hair, at least during winter’s first half. As time wears on the little stinkers lose some of their spunk, and are more likely to crawl, perch, and then crawl some more, as if they must get somewhere but don’t know where it is. When you turn off a lamp, pick up a pair of glasses, or answer the phone, a stink bug may be there.
Indoors, brown marmorated stink bugs seem to face a chronic dilemma: indoors or electronics? As for the television, as long as there is only one of them, we generally let the stink bugs enjoy TV the way they like to do it, bathed in warm flashing lights while picking up vibrations with their feet.
I seldom kill the stink bugs in my house outright, though I am likely to do so when they get halfway up the inside leg of my pants before making their presence known. Squashing live marmorated stink bugs makes them give a spicy odor that smells so much like cilantro that I sometimes call them cilantro bugs. Death neutralizes the chemicals involved, because nothing sniffable is given off when you smash dead ones.
It’s too early for me to say what marmorated stink bugs will do in my garden, because this species has been in residence here for only a few years. The Achilles heel of marmorated stink bugs is the egg stage, so I have my fingers crossed that some of the little wasps around here find the eggs to their liking. Meanwhile, here are some of the odd things I’ve learned from having brown marmorated stink bugs in my house.
They are not motivated by food. If you capture some convergent lady beetles and put them in a jar with a piece of apple, eventually they will relax and rehydrate, then happily fly away toward the closest window. While I did find that marmorated stink bugs placed on a slice of pear or raw winter squash would sink in their feeding tube for a while, this often proved to be their last meal. I suspect that the off-season physiology of marmorated stink bugs assumes that no digestive processes will take place. Sorry about that.
They move down the stairs at night. I have no theories for this odd behavior, other than to report that each night, two or three brave buggy souls attempted to make it down the wood stairs, leaving a warmer place for a cooler one. Small amounts of light could have attracted them, or brown marmorated stink bugs may feel compelled to move down. No individuals ever seemed interested in traveling upstairs.
The stink bug activity has slowed as January draws to a close. Some days, I can only find one or two of these now-familiar critters crawling in the window or perched on the telephone. A good vacuuming collects hundreds of dried-out corpses. For now, I kind of miss them.
