No, I'm not talking about millennials and their problems with communicating and forming relationships with other human beings.

I am talking about the clouds of insects peculiar to north Florida and the Panhandle in the summertime.

When we first got down here from Norf Cacklelackey in July of '99, my aunt was living over in Destin and able to fill us in on most things regarding Panhandle life. 

The one thing she said that was absolutely foreign to us was when she said how lucky we were to get here before "the lovebugs started their swarming." Having never heard of such things, it didn't sound too awful, and, sincerely, how bad can something with "love" in the name be?

Well, it turns out we had decades to look forward to of big gooey messes on our vehicles from said tiny, amorous insects. You never really see a lovebug - about a half-inch long, skinny, black with a red cape flying beetle sort of critter - until it's attached to another one in...well...that sort of way. 

And it's not one. It's hundreds, if not thousands, all managing tandem mating flights in a huge cloud of insectoid reproductive frenzy.

The sole purpose of love bugs is to remind you of how much sex you are not having. pic.twitter.com/gqBE26kaaV

— No One 🇺🇸 (@tweettruth2me) September 13, 2020

The swarms invariably are attracted to roadways and wind up splattering your vehicle from stem to stern, sometimes in impressive amounts of displaced bodily bug fluids, as you try to maintain vision through your windshield.

You quickly learn not to turn those wipers on - oh, no, no.

You then have an impenetrable bug googoo screen schmeared across your glass that only oven-cleaner and a blow torch can get off.

All that gunk is Florida Love Bugs 🐞 pic.twitter.com/dNPuOwtsB6

— Bandit Run Ric (@FloridaTransAM) March 27, 2024

The paint on your car is another matter entirely.

They have been a feature of life here as long as we've been here, and while temporarily annoying - a mostly end-of-summer phenomenon - they are legendary in their own right and the source of many jokes. God knows the little buggers are nowhere near as awful and constant as the mosquitos or biting flies on the beach.

But now it seems Science™ has zeroed in on the lovebugs as a poster child for Global Boiling. I have to admit, until I read this article, I hadn't realized the dearth of lovebugs lately, but, indeed, there...haven't been any.

And that's okay. I honestly didn't miss them.

Although I can hear the subject of this piece, this veritable lovebug love letter, and who seems inordinately attached to them, shrieking all the way from Gainesville at my words.

For decades, drivers on Florida’s highways cruised to the sound of lovers: the thunk thunk thunk of hundreds of lovebugs splattering onto their cars. 

Ruth McIlhenny remembers the slender black and orange bug as a thick coat on her windshield and mirrors after she moved to Gainesville in 1997. Her first concern: feeling like she was “committing insecticide” on the road. Then came the matter of her car’s cleanup. Once she figured out that wiping the bugs off quickly was best for protecting her paint job, she learned to live with lovebugs, she said.

But the past several years have brought cleaner windshields and fewer face-to-face brushes with clouds of paired-up lovebugs — a change that left McIlhenny wondering what it could mean to live without them.  

“I think that [people] recognize that there's something fundamentally wrong when an insect just disappears,” she said. 

The author explains that the lovebug, a "march fly species called Plecia nearctica," only lives for three or four days and spends up to twelve hours of those precious few days doing what comes naturally.

The lady being interviewed has noticed that there are far fewer of them now frolicking than there used to be and worries that the little flies have flown into the great "unexplained."

...In a trend scientists say poses risks to all ecosystems, 40% of all insects are declining globally in “the insect apocalypse.” The lovebug, whose loss across Florida remains unexplained, joins them.

Forty percent of all bugs are 'declining,' huh?

I sure hope Science™ and the author will forgive my skepticism as I am fresh off relief that their bee colony apocalypse hysteria turned out to be so much overwrought hyperbole. I'll hold off sweating "40%" of bugs going bye-bye.

...Beekeepers adjusted to colony collapse. They divided remaining colonies to make new hives. Bee numbers increased by millions.

“We’re not in any way facing an apocalypse,” says Science journalist Jon Entine. “Things have never been better in terms of the numbers of bees.”

Entine runs the Genetic Literacy Project, which challenges scientific misinformation.

I remind him that the media continue to run scare stories.

“Bees are dying at an alarming rate,” says NBC.

CNN headlines: “Bee Population is Dying ... the food we eat is at risk.”

It’s so stupid. 

“They could have just Googled bee population and they would’ve seen them going up?” I ask.

“Absolutely,” responds Entine, “it’s farcical.”

The article bangs the climate cult drum...

...Behind the decline of insects lies human harm. Habitat degradation, pollution, pesticides and other stressors have insects facing “death by a thousand cuts.” 

Climate change, which is shifting global temperatures, rainfall patterns and seasons, threatens to deepen these cuts. For insects, which can’t generate body heat and might live out the entirety of their adulthood in the span of a day, even slight environmental fluctuations can disrupt life cycles, ranges and access to host plants. 

...appealing to one's emotions in the name of the lovebugs continuing fight for survival as a beloved feature of the Florida landscape...AND A WHUT?

Oh, it's such a cute story how this INVASIVE SPECIES arrived.

...The lovebug began its love affair with the Southern United States in 1940, flying in from its original home in Central America and reaching Florida in 1949. A swarm of urban myths have followed it, including one falsely claiming lovebugs were genetically engineered by University of Florida scientists to kill mosquitos. 

Oh, get outta Dodge with this, girlfriend.

...Lovebugs may find their synchrony disrupted because of the warming climate, which could alter their seasonal peaks and allow them to extend their range north. Because lovebugs hail from the tropics, North and Central Florida will likely become less favorable to them, Leppla said, as the local climate becomes more temperate and less tropical. Changing moisture conditions could also spell trouble for the bugs, which rely on a particular range of soil moisture. Drying grasslands or heavier rains affect their ability to survive.

Good! I don't like 'tropical' up here anyway.

I'm so tired of FrankenFemmes and their dogmatic garbage presented as new laws of nature.

— Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) October 22, 2024

It's a frickin' invasive species and a pain in the butt to boot. No weeping allowed.

BE GONE, FOUL AND PESTILENT INVADERS ALONG WITH THE LOONS AND SCIENTISTS™ WHO MOURN YOU

BUZZ OFF: A Florida woman watches from her car as a huge swarm of lovebugs gather outside her Melbourne home. https://t.co/4MST7V7BNv pic.twitter.com/KwAxpJeDpo

— ABC News (@ABC) May 12, 2019

Yeah.

Haven't missed them a bit, and now I even feel okay about it.

Whackos.