(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange has some thoughts on the little creature you often find in wet towels in the summertime.
(LANGE) It was 1946. I came home from YMCA Camp Tousey after a couple of weeks in northern New York. My clothes and underwear and towels had lasted just long enough. My mother dragged my duffel bag to the washing machine and opened it up. The same fruity aroma that greets archeologists opening Egyptian tombs gushed into the room. She lifted the bag, shook it onto the cellar floor, and screamed.
If you’ve recently arrived here from Yuma, Arizona, you may not know what an earwig is. But I’ll bet you’ve seen one recently. It’s that little roachlike brown beetle that scurries out of sight when you turn on the cellar lights, or open the trash drawer, or pick up a wet towel. You may have been frightened by the fierce-looking "pincers" sticking out its back end. Or you may have been offended by the foul odor and fecal matter it left behind.
Its common name is Anglo-Saxon. In Old English it was earwicga, meaning "ear beetle." Early Anglo-Saxons often slept on the floor, and sometimes found earwicgas in their ears when they woke up. There are probably a few other Anglo-Saxon words for earwigs.
Those of us who’ve read Samuel Taylor Coleridge remember the lines, "He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small." That may be so; but I don’t think Coleridge ever had earwigs in his duffel bag, or he wouldn’t have tossed off that line so lightly.
A 1964 volume titled Beneficial Insects offers the information that earwigs have "potentialities of being definitely beneficial by attacking many harmful insects." Pretty weak, if you ask me. Bug Busters, published in 1985, maintains that "earwigs are not necessarily pests. Actually, most are beneficial." Uh-huh. Right. The University of New Hampshire Extension Service calls them "repulsive… quite destructive to home and garden plants…" and offers advice on chemical controls with more warnings than you’d find in a nuclear power plant.
A friend in Lebanon who grows herbs and vegetables says she finds earwigs in great numbers at night, feeding on her plants. Their favorites are basil, lettuce, strawberries, celery, potatoes, and the seedlings of beans and beets. They also climb into ears of corn and feed on the silk.
Most exterminators suggest traps of rolled-up newspapers, pieces of wet carpet, or chunks of garden hose – from which you shake the bugs, every couple of days, into buckets of kerosene. The herbalist in Lebanon has found they don’t like rosemary or ground oyster shells, which
suggests a ring of either around a small garden might work
The most satisfying way to get ’em, though, is with a hammer – a tool which I often have on my person, and I’m getting pretty good with it.
But then I learned that female earwigs are conscientious mothers. After laying their eggs, they stick around, disdaining day care, and brood their young till they’re able to fend for themselves. What kind of churl (another Anglo-Saxon word) would brain the mother of dozens of kids as she’s fleeing for her life?
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.