Ah good ol’ MN/WI… My wife is horrified enough driving at night during summer “snow storms” (flying insects in the headlights). One of these years I need to get her up there during a mayfly hatching period.
Mayflies are nearly harmless; they don’t bite, sting, or even eat because they fly only about 24 hours after hatching.
Actually I think that’s 24 hours after they reach their adult form. If it was 24 hours after hatching, we would have the miracle of a species which never eats at all.
It’s strange to me that when someone heedlessly slaughters a cloud of joyfully mating insects by slamming a huge metallic corporate pollution device through them, it’s somehow the bugs that are the “disgusting” and “nightmarish” part of the scene.
Maybe we could wait 24 hours and let the poor things enrich our environment by completing their brief reproductive cycle? Nah, then we’d have to walk. Surely billions of tiny deaths are less important than driving down to McDonalds to get the latest gutwhacker!
just follow instructions homer.
As an adult, a mayfly lacks a mouth.
Yup. They’re actually plenty long lived for insects. The flying adult form is just for boinking.
Aren’t these Julyflies?
For people who don’t have mayflies near them, this news report is pretty good, and should give you the basics about the insects.
I was in Iceland about six weeks ago and on the eastern side of the country, especially around Lake Myvatn, there were dust devil-like swirling columns of some kind of fly (it didn’t bite). Lots and lots of such columns. That was the most amount of flies I’d ever seen at one time, but the picture on this article makes me think there are even more in Minnesota.
I feel an urge to post this every time swarming insects are brought up.
Am I the only one who was hoping to read about the benefits of hordes of exploding mayflies rather than exploding hordes of mayflies? I love English.
That’s a nice sentiment if you’ve got a trust fund, but most of us have to work for a living, and I don’t think the boss will be super sympathetic to “I can’t come to work today because I don’t want to hurt any flies.”
I had a similar response to the title for the thread “Anthrax Letters Now on Display”. Took the appropriate action there. Now about those “exploding mayflies” — tried to find you something entertaining. Here’s a surprisingly interesting video of a man tying a “mayfly exploded nymph” fishing lure (while speaking Italian). I was fascinated (not kidding). 
Mayflies are the exact right size to be caught in Polaris pool-bot nets… a plague of mayflies is living hell to a pool owner. Their heads are just big enough to stick, leaving their bodies sticking outside the sack. Thankfully I no longer drive a pool.
Plus they get crap for mileage
Now there you go shooting down my perfectly good rant with your bloody pragmatic realism! 
Must they scream?
Once upon a time, I had a job that required me to make a weekly drive, in the wee hours of the morning, across nearly 300km of desert, to be at LAX by 6:00 AM.
On one of those nights, I experience the horror of…
The Night Of The Living Lepus!
Jackrabbits, my god, the jackrabbits… On that one fateful night it seemed as if every jackrabbit within a mile on either side of the roads I traversed felt compelled to gather by the roadside and lie in wait.
As I approached in the company truck, they would spring from the creosote bushes, two or three or more at a time, from both sides of the road, and sprint to cross it. It was like they had some urge to die under my wheels. It went on for miles… the horror… the horror.
It’s no exaggeration to say that I saw a hundred jackrabbits that night, and despite my efforts to avoid them, I know I got a few.
At least they didn’t clog up the radiator fins, but I suspect the next time the maintenance department had that vehicle up on a rack, they found some odd body parts in the front axle.
shudder
