Love Bugs

Plecia Nearctica (Diptera: Bibionidae) - Plecia necarctica Hard is the love bug that motorists frequently encounter as a serious nuisance when traveling in southern states. The insects are smashed against windshields obscuring the vision of motorists. Cars may overheat when radiators become clogged and the smashed insects damage car paint if the body fluids are not removed soon after contact. Though these bugs neither bite nor sting, at certain times of the year their sheer numbers transform these innocuous insects into airborne hordes seemingly determined to devil anyone fool enough to take to the road. Suicidal pairs of love bugs have been known to cause overheating of motors when large numbers of them are drawn into the cooling systems of liquid cooled engines.

Every May and September these sex-crazed critters become an annoyance bordering on intolerable as the air teems with mating pairs. These overly amorous critters are native to Central America; the best guess as to how they came to these United States places them as undiscovered stowaways who arrived by ship in Galveston or New Orleans around 1920. They migrated into Florida in 1947 from Louisianan, looked around, liked what they saw, and decided to stay. Their natural capacity for reproduction took care of the rest. The larval stage live in rotting vegetation most of the year.

I pulled this info from google and I know any one who wanted to know about the love bugs has waaaay toooo much info now. Right here where I live they aren't too bad but south and north of us they are really bad. This seems to be a really bad year for them. The adults don't eat or anything - just have sex lay eggs and die. For some reason they are attracted to white and to gasoline smell - any way that is what I heard - I know the whites is true because when I used to hang my white sheets out on the line during love bug season they would be all over them.