Mosquitoes follow me around like well-trained pets

The day I arrived at my little house in the winelands, I started a massacre. It had become the whinelands, with mosquitoes zzzing everywhere, so I attacked the problem with a fly-swat and some very ripe language.

Forty-something dead mosquitoes later, I felt it might finally be safe to go to bed. It wasn’t. I am catnip to mosquitoes. If you don’t want to be bitten, come lie by me; come laugh while I am devoured. I awoke with arms of Braille.

Daily, mosquitoes followed me around like well-trained pets, so the Culicidae genocide continued. The enemy had set up camp within my wicker veranda sofa. I sat down and within minutes I had eight fresh bites on my feet.

Now, I don’t like chemical weapons due to the collateral damage – spiders and I are on the same side in this mosquito war – but I launched the big guns: I doused the whole couch in Doom. Then I left the killing fields and escaped to Cape Town. There, a friend queried my scabbed arms. When I said “mosquitoes”, he raised an eyebrow. “Well, you didn’t get those in Cape Town,” he said. “Our insects are disappearing. Just try to find a spider in this city.” I did not rise to the challenge, preferring sitting there drinking medicinal gin and tonics.

However, I did start looking around. He was right: there were no annoying (though necessary) flies, but also no butterflies, no bees at all. And no mosquitoes. I wasn’t bitten once. Back on the road, it dawned on me how clean my windscreen was. I had driven from Benoni to Cape Town, across the winelands, back and forth to Hermanus, and barely used my windscreen washer.

There was a time when a cross-country trip meant a car left sculptural with massed insect corpses, the journey requiring multiple refills of the washer and much elbow grease from kindly petrol pump attendants. Now all that built up was Karoo dust. Enormous rain spiders used to keep the mosquitoes at bay at my house.

Now there’s only an occasional daddy-longlegs fighting on alone. Of late, worried scientists have been flagging this insect Armageddon, for the biomass of many species is plummeting, with vital critters like bees, spiders, and dung beetles disappearing.

However, despite my very best efforts, these damnable mosquitoes are still not under threat.

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