Blog: Max Dawson
September 15, 2016
For the past two weeks, one of the most read articles on the Beaumont Enterprise website (www.beaumontenterprise.com) is the piece about love bugs having a purpose. I read the article and could not really figure out the purpose.
Is their purpose just to obscure our vision through our windshields when hundreds are plastered on the glass on a two hour drive through East Texas? I had to drive up to Lufkin yesterday afternoon. I presented my final lessons on leadership at the Union Road church last night. By the time I got there, hundreds of those pesky love bugs (Plecia Nearctica – the scientific name) had met their demise.
This morning (after my return trip last night) I cleaned all the bugs off the front of my wife’s car. You have to do that right away because the acid in the bug’s body will eat right through your paint. It will do that rather quickly. If you wait just a few days to remove the bugs, you have waited too long. You have to get the bugs off without delay–and the typical drive-thru car wash will not get the job done. You have to take a hose and a piece of toweling and carefully remove each bug carcass by hand.
Though they can ruin your paint, that can’t be their purpose. “Purpose” implies design. They were designed to do something. I read the Enterprise article and didn’t understand the stated purpose except that they play a vital part in the ecosystem. So, I did a little research on my own–like googling “purpose of lovebugs.”
Here is what I got from the University of Florida, from Thomas Fasulo, an extension entomologist with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
Lovebugs help the environment when they are in their immature stage, Fasulo said. When grass is cut and the excess falls to the ground, it creates a covering known as thatch, where immature lovebugs live and eat. Through this process they redistribute essential nutrients back into the ground that are beneficial to plants and the environment.
Beneficial to the environment, but not to your car. By the way, when washing your car, you might want to hose the radiator. If enough love bugs collect on your radiator, it can actually cause your car to overheat.
THE FINAL WORD
Another interesting tidbit from Fasulo:
As for lovebugs looking strange when flying together attached, they are actually mating. During the mating process, the male lovebug attaches to the female lovebug and only disengages during the daytime while resting on vegetation, never during flight or at night. Successful mating takes as much as 12 hours, and the female lovebug dies within 86 hours of laying eggs.
Love bugs are part of our ecosystem. Like all things created by God, they were created and designed to fulfill a purpose. Remember the words of .
For every house is built by someone, but He who built all things is God.
Everything God created was created for a purpose. It might not always be easy for us to see that purpose, but it is always there, nonetheless.
Blessings to you my dear friends,
–Max