Adventures In Gardening, Scene 2: The June Bug Massacre

The pleasantly bald gentleman at Tallahassee Nurseries assured me that if I sprayed the $9 organic pest killer, whatever ravenous caterpillar currently devouring my rose, Nearly Wild, would be no more.  So, I purchased and dutifully sprayed.  I coated every remaining leaf, top and bottom.  I soused poor Nearly in "all-natural" poison.  And I waited.
        But when 10pm rolled around, and the croaking of toad and cricket filled the night with the crispy presence of insects, I began to doubt.  Would the killer spray really work?  What kind of demon bug leaves droppings like that, anyway?  I mean, allowing for the size ratio, we're talking the equivalent of poo produced by a herd of elephants after an orgy of sweet corn and circus peanuts.  What could possibly kill a creature of that caliber?
        I could imagine the caterpillar, creeping from its secret den, fat, bloated, but strong - belching colorful bubbles of organic bug killer before lighting back into my rosebush with renewed and now drunken abandon.
        Pippin and I exchanged glances.  She was lounging quietly on the Indonesian sofa, propped against a pillow, watching me.  I know what you're thinking, her eyes told me, and no, I wouldn't mind dipping outside for a bit.  So we went.
        Maglite in hand, I took the path down to the backyard.  Pippin raced past me into the darkness after some imaginary cat, armadillo...choose your mysterious night animal.  She pulled up just short of the overgrowth at the perimeter of the yard with a guttural warning to all beasts with trespass in their hearts.
       As I made my way to Nearly's spot, I swear I could hear a faint crunching - like the sound of a hundred tiny jaws, masticating.  The beam of light caught her branches, revealing odd movements and the dull reflection of many many...carapaces.
        They were covering the bush, clinging to every branch, chowing lazily at the buffet, not even bothering to bring their plates back to the table.  Junebugs.  Junebugs!  The gentle, dull-witted cattle of the insect world, harbingers of the Florida summer, patron beetles of my birth month.  Yes, you know the ones: they that fly stupidly into your temple and rebound, only to bump again, and again, and again.  How many had I carefully shooed out of harms way?  How many rescued from repeated and accidental attempted suicides-by-drowning in the rain bucket?  How many mourned, legs-up in the window-jam - sad victims of my imagined stupidity?  And all the time, wolves in sheep's clothing!  Junebugs gone wild!  Dancing, eating, jitterbugging, FORNICATING on my one and only rosebush!  They absolutely clung to each other, two-deep on a branch, high on organic poison and loving it.
       There was only one thing to do.  I put on my gardening gloves and I began to pick them off, one by one.  And, with a half-hearted little crunch, I squished each one of them.  Their round little bodies disappeared into the wet grass as I let them slip from my gloved fingers.  I imagined the bodies piling up beneath the blades of freshly-cut grass as I picked meticulously through Nearly's beleaguered branches.  Guilt sat in my gut like a pound of bacon grease.  I am massacring Junebugs.  I am wicked; I am cruel; I am a heartless human bent on the beautification of her own yard.... I am trying to save Nearly Wild, Vera's rosebush.  I kept crunching until her branches were bare and then I trudged back into the house.
 
       Pippin was already up on the porch, peering down beneath the lattice at my approach.  She had no interest in Junebugs and had long since left me to keep a lookout for cats from on high.  I climbed the porch stairs, holding the door open so she could slip between my ankles, into the hall.
        "Well," her trot seemed to say, "that was kind of exciting.  But, now...bed.  If you please."   She paused at the bottom of the bedroom stairs to catch my eye.  Humph! she said, tossing her head in the direction of my bedroom, waiting expectantly for my response.
        So, I guess life after committing mass murder in the defense of a leafy friend is pretty mundane.  I dutifully followed my dog up to bed and lay there for a while - but not too long - before falling asleep.  I went about my business the next day, too.  Fortunately for my deeply troubled conscience, the Junebugs returned en force for a second wave of buffet-style attacks, allowing me the experience of desensitization by sheer repetition.
        Today, I looked them up on a few gardening websites.  As it turns out, my belovedly bovine Junebugs are a pesky lot.  They start out as grubs, feeding upon the roots of my Saint Augustine grass.  This explains the sad, bilious color encompassing several patches of my lawn.  Then, they hatch and light unto the branches of trees and shrubs to feast.  Their generic Latin name, pyrgotidae, actually means "leaf eater".  Bastards.  Apparently, the innocent-looking little beetles love organic fertilizers, especially manure, and flock to any plant unlucky enough to receive such treatment in the summertime, when the bugs are active.  And, if, as Vera says, leaf-eating insects are drawn to plants in duress like flies to blood... poor Nearly.  She never had a chance.
        Unable to believe that the culprit was our own, home-grown Junebug and not some invading Japanese Beetle, Vera subjected me to a thorough interrogation on the size and appearance of the killers.   I could see why she didn't want to believe them guilty: everyone loves a Junebug.  But, though most of the corpses mysteriously disappeared by the morning after the massacre, I did manage to recover one, single, lifeless beetle.  True to scientific form, I compared my specimen to images of both Japanese invader, and Junebug.  I already new what I would find.  And there will be more where he came from.
        But I mean not to surrender.  These gorilla fighters will not overwhelm me with numbers.  I have organic poisons with which to inebriate them, and fingers with which to squash them.  And I intend to do it, one Junebug at a time.