Box Elder Bugs and the Honey Crisp

Every year, right on time, they come out from their nests with a vengeance. Hundreds, thousands, swarms and swarms of beady, red little eyes and poking, prodding, peeking antennae, up over porches, plastering across the window panes, lining every door and crevice of every house across the entire state of Minnesota, they fly, perch, crawl, creep, zoom slowly and ominously around you as you try to make your way out of the house. Their red and black wings spread straight out, their bodies vertical much like a lightning bug, and they hover and circle and dip and dive, and when they land they scuttle and scuttle and scuttle. They’re everywhere. You can’t escape them. The lawn is blanketed with their babies, little red dots with six, tiny legs. They like buildings to hibernate in, so they flock to the sides of them, and they wait for the opportune moment when an innocent human comes walking out of their door to then take flight and find their way into your home. That is of course after they’ve landed in your hair, on your shoulder, on both your arms, on your face, and all over your body first. I HATE BOX ELDER BUGS.

It wasn’t always this way. I’d find one in “my room” at work, and I would safely pick it up and set it free outside. I’ve always been a bit of nature freak when it comes to respecting life of all shapes and forms and sizes. For example, I have a hard time killing ants because I know all too well how useful they are to our environment, and to me an infestation of ants is nothing but nature’s efficient clean up crew. Spiders, the same thing. They creep me out, oh sure, but I respect their existence. It is very rare to see me squish a bug, an insect, arachnid, a life of any kind. My only exceptions to this rule in the past have been mosquitoes, flies, and ticks. And, well, for good reason. I still haven’t figured out the purpose to any of their existences. But my list ended there.

The box elders didn’t always used to be this…abundant. It started only a few years ago, and to this day I can’t scientifically explain why their nests just keep getting bigger and bigger every year since, or, how it even started in the first place. All I know is that every year, autumn sets herself in, and the box elders suddenly emerge by the millions. Having a bedroom in the basement doesn’t help, let me tell you. I’m swatting at box elders all the way through Christmas and Valentine’s. Yes, swatting. Box elders are now on my “TO DIE” list. After getting attacked by hundreds of them every time I open the back porch door, I think I can safely assume that their chance of species survival is pretty damn good, and killing about fifty of them a day won’t be that detrimental to the environment. There’s still millions of them covering the pool shed out back.

Food. They must be food for the birds before the winter, right? That’s got to be their purpose…. But it’s not. No. You may not be familiar with the term “box elder bug”, but are you familiar with the term “stink bug”? Oh yes. These are stink bugs by the thousands, millions. Kill one with your bare hands? Your finger will stink for three days. This is also a reason they are not eaten.

I love autumn. I do. But these harmless little vermin are killjoys for the great equinox that so desperately wants to be celebrated. I can’t celebrate you, Autumn. Not when you send us millions of stupid little bugs that stink and zoom at you like little air raids from nature’s hell pit. Seriously. I’m wanting to crawl into a giant tripod ship with an exterminating gun and pulverize the crap out of their existence. Now, coming from a nature lover such as myself, this is truly saying something.

But as my mother wisely said to me as I was having a ridiculous fit about seeing twenty of them on the inside of the screen porch door, “They’re just bugs…”. This is true, I say to myself. They are just bugs. And they’re harmless. They don’t bite. They don’t eat your house. They can kill trees, though, but other than that they prove no real threat. They’re the most unprotected, easy-to-kill bug I’ve ever squashed, oozing guts with one, feeble swat. This is a positive thing. They’re not like ticks where you have to literally rip all their legs off and use your nail to tear their thick, invincible skin apart, and then, to be safe, flush them down a toilet. They’re not like mosquitoes where even though they fly ever so slowly they seem to have this annoying knack of always escaping your seemingly quick hand. No. Box elders are wimps. They’re soft, slow, unafraid of people, and really easy to kill. And all I want to do is KILL, KILL, KILL.

This new violent nature frightens me slightly. I have decided that I need to counteract this malicious behavior and attitude by trying to find a more positive thing about Minnesota autumns. I was recently informed that the honey crisp apple is Minnesota’s state fruit. Have you ever eaten a honey crisp apple? They are, literally, to die for. And here’s the kicker, Folks: I hate fruit. I’ll eat an apple maybe once a year. I’ve forced myself to eat bananas when I’m having digestive issues. Every five years or so I’ll get a fluke craving for a slice of orange, but that’s usually from a weird body chemical imbalance thing because usually oranges make me gag. Grapes? I haven’t eaten a grape in six years. Plums I can handle on occasion. Peaches, pears, pineapple, any kind of berry (unless it’s blueberries in muffin form), mango, cantaloupe, grapefruit, all of it makes me want to gag when I put it in my mouth. I’ve always hated this about my taste buds, too, because fruit is so pretty, colorful, alluring, natural, and nothing makes me think Garden of Eden more than fruit trees and berry bushes. I love to write about fruit, write about characters eating it, because it’s such a universally enjoyed pleasure, a healthy indulgence, a communion with our planet, our roots, our existence as we know it. I envy the fruit lovers. I envy the communion with earth that I feel I am sorely missing out on.

But alas, Reader. Alas! Minnesota has come to offer something I never thought possible. I have discovered a fruit that I love to eat, a fruit that I can indulge in, a fruit that grows from a tree in an orchard of fire-blazing heavenly golden leaves a flutter, all an ode to an Eden that no longer exists. I, Reader, have fallen in love with the honey crisp apple. Even the name of it sounds luscious! It’s the perfect apple. It’s sweet, with just a slight hint of apple tartness. It’s juicy. It’s not soft like the Cortland apple. Yes, the Cortland apple. My hometown’s apple. My New York hometown’s apple. I hate the Cortland apple. You can buy Cortland apples in just about every state of the country, and they all come from an orchard in the upstate New York hills that I have been to many times in my childhood. It was the same, cheap field trip every year. We got to watch cider being made. This was not as fascinating to me as it was to others. Squished up apples in a giant press looks like vomit to me. The smell was always nice, but the squished up apples was revolting. I never liked the taste of cider, either. The smell, I’ll say again, is nice. Nostalgic. The cliché but ever comforting smell of autumn. After the cider tasting on this annual field trip, we would buy a few Cortland apples with the money our mothers gave us to spend, and I would never eat them. They’re small, soft, and tart. No thanks.

But the honey crisp! It is not soft. It is, as it proclaims in its name, crisp. So crisp! Juicy…sweet…a communion with our planet that I can now fully enjoy. Stink bugs be damned. I’ve got myself an apple to eat.