He does things like that. He delights me.

He won't kill insects when I want one removed from the house interior. Instead, depending on what it is, he usually carefully picks it up delicately with two fingers; index and thumb, trying not to exert any pressure, places it into his palm and takes it outside. Sometimes he will wrap one in a tissue and shake it outside. I've tried doing the same thing, but small as my fingers are, I don't seem to have the same touch he has.

There are times I'll end up killing an insect. Some of them I find disgusting. Certainly I do when they're in their larvae stage. Some are really creepy, like like earwigs and silverfish. We once had a house with a damp cellar and had a problem with silverfish, many years ago. I wish earwigs would stay where they belong, in the garden. Sometimes they enter the house, and I detest them.

We've occasionally had ant invasions. Ants are harmless, but can be a real nuisance, since carpenter ants are not quite harmless.We were once away from home for a week and on our return discovered hundreds of tiny red ants marching through the kitchen. I'd left something edible under of all things, a bell jar and damned if the minuscule creatures weren't able to make their way under and into it.

One winter we discovered tiny black ants making their way up the stairs to the second floor of the house. Winter! They had obviously found a delightful haven, warm and dry in which to over-winter, planning to share our house with us. We had other plans, and managed to convince them that this house was not for sharing.

I still don't like seeing spiders in the house, though their presence can be beneficial in that they trap and eat other insects. And moths, pantry moths, once you get an infestation, even though you discard any foodstuffs that you discover to be infected with their presence, vigorously wash down cupboards, place a few pheromone traps, they're hard to eradicate. Years ago it actually took me a year to accomplish freeing up the kitchen pantry from the presence of those moths.

My husband used to keep birdseed in a large lock-top container in the clothes cupboard at the front of the house for convenient ease of access to fill up bird feeders we kept in the front garden over the winter months. Later we discovered that wearing apparel kept in that cupboard were full of moth larvae. That stopped the ease of access habit fairly quickly.

Ticks can be a problem, and a growing one in fact, since some of them carry pathogens leading to disease, just like mosquitoes do. We've found a few attached to our little dogs in the past. But for the past two years they've been medicated against ticks, so that concern has been alleviated. We've found a few on ourselves as well, so we're fairly alert to their presence.

The presence of flies really bothers me. In the summer months our little dogs are able to slide open the patio screen door themselves; poodles are very adept at that kind of thing. If we're not around when they've done that, to close the screen, chances are a large black housefly will follow them into the  house. Not much horrifies me as much as seeing one fly about and land somewhere in the kitchen. Their bacterial and germ contamination potential is enormous. We're pretty diligent about getting rid of them and mostly they're anxious themselves to vacate the premises; if they land on the interior of the screen door or the patio door, we usually succeed in guiding right back outside. Including the occasional wayward wasp.

The proclivity of fruit flies to make their presence known in fall with the proliferation of fresh local fruits on the market is another peculiar seasonal phenomenon, one that I don't look forward to. You buy fresh produce, and it looks fine, uncontaminated by the presence of any little creatures, but once you get the fruit home you suddenly find there are these tiny fruit flies hanging about; some years worse than others. I always wash bananas before placing them in a fruit bowl; most other fruit goes into the refrigerator with the exception of mangoes and avocados. But fruit flies begin to congregate around the bananas and I wonder where they've come from.

I never believed that those cute little orange-spotted Lady bugs were a nuisance. They hunt aphids on the roses, after all, and they're valuable sentries and gardener-helpers outdoors. In the last several years, however, we've experienced a rush of Lady bugs in little clouds of orange spots, even entering the house. And guess what? They bite. Really.

Which brings me to June bugs and their presence in the garden after having hibernated underground all winter as grubs. They are large, dark and ugly, and fortunately seldom venture into the house, and that's a relief. I find them often in my garden watering pails, doing the dead-man float. Not seen as frequently as they once were, nor are those bright orange lily beetles that devour our lilies and lay their eggs on the stalks to develop into ugly little strings of larvae, mixed up with their droppings.

Other foliage predators have, however, taken their place; Japanese beetles. They've inundated our garden with their unwanted presence for the past three or four years in a spectacular invasion of bronze-shelled bodies and voracious appetites. For a month or two they demolish flowers and foliage in the garden like there's no tomorrow, and then they fade. Before they 'disappear', however, they've already laid their eggs in the ground to overwinter, and the grubs will mature into a new generation of hungry beetles by early summer. On their way to maturation, the grubs, naturally, eat the roots of the grass and destroy your lawn. They're resilient; we've tried pressure spraying them with water, mixed up our own solution with vinegar, pepper, water, garlic, to no avail. We've sprinkled nematodes. The beetles love water and thrive in it. And we've had very wet springs and summers of late.

The first time I ever saw Japanese beetles was during one walk in the forest when I espied a mass of thriving beetles in the hollowed out crook of an old tree. Singly, those beetles' carapaces are quite beautiful; seeing them in a mass is fascinating. Witnessing their destructive power is alarming.