It is possible to eat mosquitoes. That’s right — it is possible to eat the singing suckers.
A good many of the flying insects belong to the Diptera classification and, according to Treehugger.com, they can be eaten. This could be reassuring to the people who go into the outdoors and happen to swallow a few.
However, it is doubtful that the Rib Truck will be offering any barbecued proboscis for sampling.
It would appear that there is an overabundance of these suckers in the area. So what can be done? Options might include having a bounty on the blighters. For every 50 brought in dead, you get five cents from the town office.
At one time, the state of Maine was offering a bounty on porcupine noses. Town clerks could accept that a parking or similar ticket was paid with a number of noses equal to the charge. Many a trapper would make his point this way. But the sheer manpower to count or weigh skeeters renders this a losing proposition.
Perhaps a catching contest. How many skeeters can one snatch out of the air? Wash hands, walk outside, flex forearms and, when seen, grab the horde of buzzers before you get bitten. It would be a buzzer-beating event that even the Olympics might offer in the future.
There is always the friendly slap-your-neighbor approach, too: see mosquito, wait for it to land on neighbor, then slap down hard. The local sheriff’s deputy would ask that this not be done. Slapping leads to many misunderstandings of a legal sort and the court already has a full docket. If your neighbor is an idiot, buy him a cup of coffee and laugh at his jokes.
Prime season for mosquitos and black flies is now. This sucks. Best to buy some bug juice. Apply liberally and with enthusiasm. Then go fishing. Fish do eat bugs, and thus you can have your mosquito cake and eat it too. Who knows? You might even get a free concert from the singing bait staff.
Orpheus Allison is a photojournalist living in The County who graduated from UMPI and earned a master of liberal arts degree from the University of North Carolina. He began his journalism career at WAGM television, later working in many different areas of the US. After 20 years of television he changed careers and taught in China and Korea.
