Home Garden Joy

Stink Bugs or What Is That Smell

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Stink bugs…they’re everywhere! I’ve lived in the country for seven years now, and I still make mistakes. The biggest mistake so far this year was trying to vacuum up this critter, left. It’s a stink bug. Stink bugs, as well as lady bugs, invade my house in the fall. Most of the stink bugs end up in the master bathroom and bedroom, where they scare the living daylights out of me by zooming out from behind the curtains. Last week, one of them bit me when I picked up my washcloth and accidentally grabbed the bug resting on the corner of it. Okay, I’d had it. I decided to get rid of them once and for all. Most of them drop dead during the winter months, creating a crunchy mess underfoot, but a few stalwarts remained to harass me. Even the cats don’t want to mess with them. It was time to get out the big guns. The vacuum cleaner.
We have a central vac in the house, which means that the big monster vacuum unit and the bag is in the basement. I connect a hose to the outlets, which automatically turns on the vac. I use the thing to remove lady bugs that venture indoors, so why not the stink bugs?
Because (you dolt, I now scold myself)…they’re stink bugs. As in: they stink.
True story.
My husband called me down to his woodworking shop in the basement on Tuesday night. He is building a new bookcase and was working on it for about an hour before he called to me in the kitchen. “Hey, can you come down here a minute?’
I went downstairs to join him in the cellar. He walked around sniffing like Gus on Psych. 

“Do you smell that? I think one of the cats pooped down here.”  We don’t keep a litter box in the basement, and occasionally one of the outdoor cats, allowed inside on a rainy or snowy day, uses the sawdust covered area under his workbench as a toilet if they can’t find the upstairs litter boxes.
We hunted for the offending element to no avail. Suddenly I realized that the smell was exuding from the area near the vacuum cleaner main unit and bag mounted on the wall.  Uh-oh. Stink bugs. I’d gone crazy cleaning the past weekend, vacuuming everywhere before scrubbing the bathroom for top to bottom. I pictured a fermenting mess of the nasty critters in the bag.
We eventually gave up looking for the source, and I kept my lip zipped. Today the odor has faded, but not before this city kid learned an important lesson: never, ever, vacuum up stink bugs.
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