Dangerous!
With higher temperatures across the northeast fruits and vegetables are ripening faster than normal. Insects are having a wonderful time and breeding yet another generation of bugs to plague the crops. Fruit that normally is insect free this year is, in some cases being infested with bugs and late growing maggots. So the crops are not harvestable. This is a problem for the farmer in several ways.
- He looses the crop, that means he has less money than expected this year.
- He can’t get the crop off the bushes it just has to stay there and rot for the most part paying workers to pick unmarketable fruit is a waste of money. There is no mechanical way to pick it so its going to just sit there.
- The dry weather means that the fruit is not rotting because mold only develops when there is some moisture. Fruit may have maggots but its not rotting.
- The absence of mold means that yeast can proliferate more. These will eat the crops and just like in beer they product alcohol. So the fruit is not rotting its fermenting!
Guess what? Insects like alcohol too! Fermenting fruit is a delight that is going to draw insects in for the party of the year. The hot weather can also cause the nectar in later blooming flowers to ferment too.
Do bugs get drunk? They sure do. It can be fun to watch bugs drinking fermented nectar and then weaving off on a very wobbly flight path after leaving the flower or fruit. As a child I used to love watching the bees drink the fermented nectar from our Sedum flowers and then fly off all over the place. With other insects is harder to tell if they are drunk. How can you tell if an ant is drunk? I don’t know they weave around even when they are sober, but a lot of them can still bite.
Problem is that a drunk stinging insect is like a drunk driver, they don’t know what they are doing. They can crash into you and then get annoyed and sting for no reason. Drunk insects can be a real danger from the stinging perspective. Drunk bees are usually not too bad since when a bee stings it dies so even a drunk bee tends to be a little concerned but if she is very drunk then she might just sting without thinking about the consequences. (All forager bees are female).
Drunk yellow jackets or hornets are a different matter. They can sting to their hearts content so drunk ones can be quite unpredictable and just sting because they feel like it. Non flying insects are not such a problem. They might run up your legs and bite you but its not as likely, unless you are near aggressive ants, but they wild do that drunk or sober.
Your best option is to stay away from areas where there is ripening fruit or plants that have lots of nectar at this time of year. Don’t let young children near these areas. Just like my mother would not let me close to our sedum plants when the nectar was fermenting don’t let children or pets near them now. Drunken insects can be nasty.
