Blake writes:
You’d think a tropical location like Hawaii would be positively
brimming with exotically nasty spiders and insects, but it’s actually fairly
benign in that regard. There are
supposedly black widows and brown violin spiders (a close relative of the brown
recluse) but they are not commonly seen and bites are quite rare. Cane spiders are said to be the size of softballs
and therefore quite scary, but they are non-venomous and actually considered beneficial. Nevertheless, I don’t mind that we haven’t had
the “benefit” of being surprised by one yet.
Much more common in the spider department here are the crab spiders –
small, spiny little things whose webs stretch across vast expanses of space
between our rental house and the surrounding foliage. Unfortunately, the webs are frustratingly
difficult to see and usually constructed at a height where they are most
frequently discovered with one’s face. When
I hear Deborah shriek outside the house I automatically think “spider web” (if
she shrieks inside the house I think, “gecko”).
She has taken to stashing what she calls “spider sticks” at strategic
locations around the property to grab and wield in a waving pattern in front of
her as she goes about her business. It
doesn’t always work – thus the periodic shrieking. Our neighbor told us come May the cardinals
appear in great numbers and feast on the crab spiders until suddenly they are
all gone. We look forward to May.
I’ve seen carpenter ants before but not until I came to Hawaii
have I come across carpenter bees. They’re
big, black and bumble-bee-shaped.
Actually, just the females are black, but they’re the ones you mostly
see – presumably because they are doing most of the work. The yellow-orange males I rarely see. The females can sting but don’t seem at all
aggressive. Their nesting holes were
quite obvious in parts of our avocado tree that we had pruned recently. Better there than in your house I suppose.
Termites are a big problem here in Hawaii. As I’m finding out in our home construction
project, the wood used is all treated to deter the pests and foundation posts
are fashioned with termite shields to block them from climbing up into your
house from below and eating it up from the inside out. Older homes are more vulnerable and often
have to be “tented” every five to ten years.
This is an amazing procedure wherein an entire house is covered in a
giant tent to allow the enclosed space beneath to be fumigated. I assume this process kills off the
cockroaches as well. We haven’t seen too
many of them in our rental ohana but you know in this climate they will
thrive. Some are quite large and create
quite the mess on the bottom of your sandal if you choose that method of
dispatching them. If you don’t feel like
scraping their remains off the floor you can just leave it overnight and the tiny
ants will appear to magically clean most of the gooey bits away by morning. The ants love anything sweet also, which is
why – as we did in Fiji – we have to put most food items either in the
refrigerator or in zip lock bags or in air tight canisters.
Pretty much every time I work out on our property I see
centipedes. These can supposedly grow to
8 or 9 inches long and pack a very painful bite. I haven’t seen any quite that large but I
have seen 6 inchers, which are daunting enough.
They aren’t aggressive though. If
you can avoid accidently touching them and setting off some defensive behavior
they won’t bother you. They do like all
the wood chips we’ve laid around our property so we have to be careful when
pulling weeds (which we do often – I sometimes think we bought a weed farm).
Spiders, spiders, everywhere...
Garden Spider (harmless)
Carpenter Bee
Holes in Our Avocado Tree from Nesting Carpenter Bees
Has the circus come to town? No, just the termites.
