Blake and Deborah in Hawaii: Some Nonhuman Pests

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).