Scorpions continued...again...

We had a youth activity for church a couple weeks back - the annual scorpion hunt. We armed them with gloves, blacklights, pinchers and jars. They each took different areas in our neighborhood and they canvased the area. Surprisingly the girls got into it much more than I had imagined (they clearly share my passion for hunting!). We hit one house where we caught almost 20. It was a gold mine and everyone was giddy with excitement. With each additional scorpion we dropped in the jar we'd step back and admire our work with pride.

When we met up with everyone at the end of the night, we all dumped our jar of 50-100 scorpions in one large jar. It was disturbing. Hundreds of scorpions crawling all over each other glowing in the blacklight. It made my skin crawl watching them. I like to kill them as soon as I see them, not collect them and watch them move around.

We didn't make it to our house the night the youth went out and it had been a couple weeks since I had personally gone hunting, so we were due.

Our brother-in-law asked us to do a little experiment before we hunted the scorpions. He's testing some diatomaceous earth and wondered it's effect on scorpions. So he asked us to go out one night and count them - but not kill them. Then we were to spread some DE and then go back a couple days later and count again.

Friday night I reminded Steve of our obligation, so we went out together. The pool area always has the most and it did not disappoint: we found 7. We made our way around the rest of the house and we were shocked at how many we found. (another word for shocked might be disgusted.) We found 30! That is more than 3 times more than any other time we've gone out. When we first started counting, I was okay with not killing them - the more we came across the more I wanted to run into the garage and grab my trusty can of brake cleaner. I did not want to chance any of those suckers coming into my house, but we didn't kill a single one. The next morning Steve went out and applied the DE. We've got three more days until we can go count again.

It's made me a little paranoid. I refuse to walk around the house without any shoes on because something tells me out of the 30 we saw, at least three of them will make their way into our home. Shivers down my spine...