Are Dallas Bugs the Worst in the Nation? At Least We Don't Have Greenheads

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JOANNE RATHE/GLOBE STAFF

JOANNE RATHE/GLOBE STAFF

I have returned from Maine, a state I love for many reasons. Number 1, lobster. Number two, my good friend Ron Corning was born there, number three my husband’s precious grandfather bought a home there on the Maine coast where we vacation every summer. The east coast has been unseasonably wet, and was also unseasonably hot last weekend. Let me tell you 91 degrees in Kennebunkport was almost unbearable save for that glorious 70 degree Atlantic Ocean.

And few homes up there have air conditioning.

All this heat and wetness has made the bugs even buggier in southern Maine. Anyone heading that way? I strongly suggest dousing the plane with Off! before you even take off! The mosquitos were the nippiest little bastards, even during daylight hours, but the *^%#@! greenhead flies were pure savages. Usually, their larvae comes up out of the soil where they have spent the winter, they hatch in June and are gone come early July. But the full sun and wet salt water marshes made them more than fertile this year, and late.

Last year, the Massachusetts coast was severely nibbled up by this flying leach. Greenheads are big nasty flies with green eyes. They don’t just bite you, they gouge your skin with a preference for legs and ankles. A mosquito sticks a long, painless “proboscis” into victims and simply draws blood. How refined. But a female greenhead goes about it crudely, beast that she is, tearing skin and spitting.

According to Gabrielle Sakolsky, an entomologist and assistant superintendent of the Cape Cod Greenhead Fly Control District, greenheads have mouth parts that slash a hole in the victim’s skin to create a pool of blood. Then, and this is so grotesque, they spit saliva into the human to act as an anticoagulant. Other mouth parts soak up the victim’s blood – lovely. Basically horse flies, they are slower and you can swat them dead but once they bite, they leave behind a golf-ball or larger sized welt that remains hard and itchy for days.

The best relief comes from just soaking in the sea water.

Which brings me to why I wrote this: we have a lot of critters in Dallas, but we sure don’t have these green biting bastards flying around. Mosquitos and the threat of West Nile, yes, but I find those little buggers stay dormant during the day.

Besides, we have lizards and geckos who eat mosquitos. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Dallas is buggy: yes, we are number 17 on Off’s Most Buggy City list — Houston is #3 –, but 60% of northeasterners say they fear an itchy bug bite more than anything from mosquitos.

That or a vampire bite from a greenhead.

Candy Evans, founder and publisher of CandysDirt.com, is one of the nation’s leading real estate reporters.

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