Fireflies
 

Nothing like them. They're all over our front acreage tonight (and for the past week). A rite of early summer, I'm happy that my father, who has joined us from Ontario and is having his first summer here, is also enjoying them. He recalls them from his time in northern Ontario when he was 'knee-high to a grasshopper'. I love watching them as they dip and weave over the sloping fields to the west and northwest of the house.

Gosh I'd love to see fireflies.
I'll put them on the list.

I heard John Barrowman do a lovely, delicate version of the song "Fireflies" but all I can find online is a jumpy-dancey version which I don't think suits the song.
Shame, because it can be a sweet song and I forgot how nicely the boy sings.

Yes, fun to watch, especially when they simply liter the horizon. I've seen some time-lapse photos on the net showing their flight as a dotted line.
Ah, thank you Google.

They were out in force last night while I was in the apiary getting stung. Aggressive at night, noted and learned.

I have never seen one. I dont think we get them here.

At night, they think they are being robbed and are much more aggressive. They can be cranky in the rain and high humidity as well.
You will get to know when not to bother them. (But you're having fun, yes?) We don't have nearly as many fireflies as when I was young. There were just a few out last night, when there used to be hundreds of them.:(

Lightning bugs.

We had two of them up under my porch roof Saturday night. Blinking quickly and chasing each other around. They use the light to locate mates.

I remember getting home right at dusk one night when we lived in Coatesville. It was the first time Spencer experienced them. We had a great time chasing them around in front of the house.

And several occasions when I was a child, collecting them in jars with my buddies. Hundreds of them.

When you hit one with your car's windshield, the bug splat glows green.

Luciferase is the main ingredient that puts the Lightning in the bugs. Interestingly, at my last gig, luciferase was the key to their main business. They produced testing kits and supplies to verify hygiene of surfaces used in food production. Unlike the dirty chickens in a different thread where pathogens are the focus of attention, verifying that a surface is biologically clean is harder to do.

The way their product worked is like this: take a sterile swab and wipe it on the surface you wish to test. This could be any part of a food preparation surface, machinery, anywhere. Take that swab and insert it into the instrument produced by the company and press a button. The reading on the instrument would then reveal whether or not there were any biological contamination on the swab, and by extension, on the surface tested. This was done ingeniously by noting that luciferase lights up when in the presence of ATP, adenosine triphospate, the fuel for cells. Should the swab, spiked with luciferase, be combined with ATP, light would be emitted. The instrument detects this emission and thereby indicates the presence of ATP, which implies that the surface in question has *NOT* been cleaned completely. This is good to know, since we all want food prepared on, by and with surfaces and equipment that is sterile. This is a good way to know.

Because, of course, you can't see the biological contamination, any more than you could see the gross splashies from that chicken. By the way, the company also produced test kits for the detection of specific pathogens, e. coli, salmonella, etc.

Lightning bugs are cool!!

I know a guy who knows a guy that had something to do with that application of lightning bug lightning.

When I moved to this location in 1979 there were tons of them. Then they seemed to diminish a little more every year for awhile then the population exploded. They seem to cycle like that but I don't know if it's a know phenomenon or just peculiar to my neighborhood.

Ah Wiki says... Maybe that's why the population fluctuates. Damifino.:dunce:

One night I was out in the boondocks, very little light pollution, and came to a stop sign. Directly across the road was a giant field of tall grass (weeds), and in this field was the greatest single concentration of fireflies I have ever witnessed. It was hypnotizing. I turned off my headlights and just sat there, staring. Then after a couple minutes, I turned off the Jeep, and sat there and stared some more.

I sat there for probably fifteen to twenty minutes, by myself, watching lightning bugs.

I'll never forget it.

Nice. Wish I could've seen that too.

We still see thousands every night, all over the acres down to the road and across the creek. It's the summer porch-sit movie.

I didn't realize this was uncommon. I'm so lucky, here. So much nature up close and doing its thing.

Yes, you are. I live in a city all my life. Never seen a firefly before. :sniff:

You must arrange it, then. Come to our few acres, if nothing else. No one should live out a life without seeing fireflies.

I read somewhere that only one in five people have seen the Milky Way. It's pretty hard to see from the city.

I was just outside sitting in the dark, and saw no fireflies. :(

Keryx says that she remembers seeing fireflies when she was a kid, but not in a long time.

I killed 7 of them in my bedroom last week.

Evil Toad :eek:

I am sorry, I realize that it is against your spiritual sensibilities Lola. But in my current living conditions, I can see no way around it. In the farmhouse, it is them or me.

At this time I am besieged by three different species of ant. This morning I destroyed a deer tick that was sitting outside on my door frame. I mistakenly left a bucket of water sitting outside for a few days and the local West Nile-carrying mosquito population went crazy.

It's only through the drinking of many, many gin and tonics, containing the valuable medication Quinine, that I will survive the summer.

It's OK as long as you eat them. ;)

UT, are you sure you dont live in my neighbourhood?

Gin and tonics.

I mean don't spare the tonic. There's a reason it's called tonic. Use a good brand. And a healthy squeeze of lime will prevent the scurvy, if yours is not an orange juice drinking nation.

There have been plenty of those consumed by me. :)

Someone (Limey?) needs to point it out to me one day. I've been in plenty of places away from light pollution and have still never seen it.
... well I guess in a country where people eat witchetty grubs...

If you have seen any star ever, you have seen part of the Milky Way. When people refer to the Milky Way in the sky, they are just talking about an area where the stars are thicker and take on a cloudy appearance. But it's all the Milky Way. You need a really dark sky to see anything that's not part of the Milky Way.

We has that. Sometimes.

Ginandwhatnow?

I have seen some awesome stary skies from the outback. Unbelievable.

The sky in the wilderness of UP Michigan is much different from here in Ann Arbor. Which in turn is very different from that in Birmingham UK. incredible. and always shooting stars, even when there isn't supposed to be a shower you will see the odd one. They created a Dark Sky Park fairly recently, right where the two peninsulas meet

http://www.emmetcounty.org/darkskypark/

but we get plenty of fireflies here in the city. never saw one before I moved to the US though

When you go out west here in Oz, in the winter during the dry months, the sky is amazing. It's so clear that you can see satellites moving across the sky, and not just the odd one. It is one of the things I will always love about this country, although I suppose you would get the same effect in sparsely populated areas all over the world, so it's not just us, but still, I think it's something pretty special to be laying on your back in the middle of the desert, looking up into space through a sky so vast. It's humbling.

I would have put all this in my previous post, but I was on my phone. :)

It's hard to put into words how awesome a starry sky is in a rural dry area. Especially at high altitude.

Living in the city, you forget there are stars.

My county has recently put in ultra bright streetlights. I hate them.

I have been researching the gin and tonic problem lately and have come to the conclusion that the tonic is possibly more important than the gin. So far, Schweppes is the only tonic I've found that have adequate carbonation. Canada dry goes flat instantly, as do all the others. I've even tried a couple of the hippy artisanal tonics and they plain suck.

And fireflies. Yeah.

The lodge we stayed at by Yosemite had these drinks called Hetch Hetchy Mules. Really yummy.

Vodka, ginger liqueur, ginger beer, gingershrub bitters, and fresh lime.

I'd love to recreate it, but how hard is it going to be to track down all that stuff?

How many frequent flier miles do you have?
:D

I only have Angostura bitters, not gingershrub bitters, but all the other ingredients are in my kitchen right now. So, not too tough. Do you have a Trader Joe's nearby? I think I got my ginger liqueur from the local liquor store, the other stuff is not very exotic.

I said it as a joke to you. I don't like to impose my beliefs on other people, so I would not make such judgments on others. I only made that joke because we were all commenting how beautiful the lights fireflies make when you remarked that you just killed some. I thought it was kind of funny. :-P

:headshake She's seen through your mild mannered IT Admin disguise, and knows the evil toad that lurks beneath. :lol2:

I thought I was being respectful!! Naw it's all good