Bugs

We were camping at a lake not to far from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. It was late afternoon and I was doing the last load of laundry, wanting to finish it before it would be dark.  I noticed a group of moth like creatures flying just above my head. I figured they were nocturnal and would soon move on, so I paid little attention to the around 20 bugs. Soon there were more of these flying bugs. They weren’t very coordinated, quite a few killed themselves by flying straight in to the water in my washing crate. It started to rain but I was dry underneath the back door that was open. I noticed more and more of these bugs around the van and even spotted a few getting in the back underneath the bed. By now there were quite a lot and they were flying in my face and getting in my hair. So I abandoned the washing, thinking I could finish the last few items when they had moved on. Inside we closed the side door but left the back door open, with the curtains closed. We would soon regret not taking these bugs seriously…??

After a few minutes I noticed there were quite a few inside the van at the back door. It was now raining heavily. Kilian quickly went outside and closed the door. We caught the ones that had gotten inside and thought that was it. But no. There were now hundreds of these flying bug inside! They came in through every tiny gap. Through the door where the rubbers don’t fit together a 100% , through a practically invisible opening between the tented roof and the actual roof of the van and a few other places. Outside the van there were hundreds, thousands probably flying around. We then spend the next hour catching and killing them one by one. Moving the mattress and the support board that helps keep the tented roof up. And it soon turned out these bugs were really shedding their wings, transforming into crawling bugs. We had no internet reception so we couldn’t look up what they were. We collected so many bugs and wings that they blocked the sink as we tried to flush them since water seemed to kill them as well. They covered our bedding and Binkies waterbowl was filled with them. Finally after about two hours we had caught almost all off them and there were less outside as well. When they were all but gone we went outside to check. The van was covered in dead bugs and wings and so was my laundry. I would have to do the laundry again. We cleaned up the best we could and went to bed.

The next morning we emptied out the van and used the bug spray in case they had laid eggs and to get rid of the remaining few. I did the laundry again. We cleaned the inside of the van the best we could. Fortunately no bugs had been flying or crawling around in the night, so it looked like we got them all. Although we would still be finding wings a week later. After two hours of cleaning we packed up and drove towards the city. There we saw them flying around as well. After an online search we think they were probably a species of flying termites, although we are not a 100% sure. Luckily we have very little wood in the van and we haven’t seen them any more. We probably had the bad luck to camp close to an (underground) nest and they hatched while we were camping there.