Last night my girlfriend Fiona and I were a little shocked to see this little insect climbing the kitchen wall of our flat (in London):
Our fear is that it’s a cockroach… The image above is a bit crap, so I’m not sure if you can tell, but it does look a bit similar to the photos on the Wikipedia Cockroach article to me…
This isn’t the first time we’ve had unwanted insect life in our flat. Over the last few months we seem to have become home to quite a population of ladybirds…
Not really the biggest problem you have, although Fiona has somehow managed to develop a phoebia of them. Because we sometimes see them mating (!!), she reckons that some of the more recent ones, which seem have mostly black coloured shells with a few odd bits of red, are inbred. I’m not sure that the colour is all that significant – but Wikipedia doesn’t have any information either way to help us out on this one.
Because of the (possible) cockroaches, ladybirds, and previously wasps, bees, beetles and other unidentified bugs, Fiona has developed a cunning plan of stuffing old socks into the cracks between the sash window panes, as this is a possible entrance point (and there’s a tree outside)…
I wonder what new insect life the spring and summer will bring…
Update: After posting this photo to the Flickr ID Please group, someone has commented that “it looks like an ordinary German Cockroach (Blattella germanica) – judging from the elongated and square-ish posterior, it also looks like a female with an egg case”. Eek!
Linda said:
Try posting it to the Id Please group on Flickr. They have people who just love identifying bugs :-) Poor Fiona!(BTW the ladybirds just huddle together like that for warmth rather than mating! Sometimes you can get at many as 10 piled up together.)
jude said:
Hi!
This feels very strange and more than a bit embarrasing, but I just started my new blog and I was wondering if maybe you’d like to check it out. It’s nothing extraordinary but I am not trying to sell anything or promote anyone, and I would really appreciate it if you looked at it (since it’s not really much fun to have a blog that nobody reads).
It’s utmostlevity.blogspot.com
Thanks!
Jude
Jude
cockroach said:
that clearly is a cockroach