What's Biting You, My Delicious Darling?

Here They Come, Brave Conflabbians!

The Ticks! The Mosquitoes! The Ants! The Gnats! The Wasps! The Horseflies! The Yellowjackets! The Cicadas! O! Conflabbians! Here they come! The Biters! The Bleeders! The Stingers! The Rash-Givers! The Killers!

Now. . . ya know I just lurve an insect.

When I meet a dragonfly, a beetle, a lady bug, a cricket, a spider, a slug, an ant, I invite it in. Or, I take it out—which ever it prefers.

After all, I bunked in a pump house on O’Dell Creek outside Ennis, Montana, off and on for years, as I’ve mentioned before, and slept on a cot beneath—and you’re gonna think I’m exaggerating, but I am absolutely not—beneath fourteen—14!—shiny Black Widow Spiders, each with an red hour-glass on her tum tum. (Actually they looked like a very dark brown patent leather, and the red hour glass appeared bright red-orange—but they were definitely WIDOWS and I call upon the illustrious David Quammen, the greatest living science writer in America to confirm this fact.) Someti…