These are the yellowish-red ladybugs with black spots, slightly larger than the traditional version, and they bite. People were spitting ladybugs, swatting ladybugs and shaking ladybugs out of their shirts. A server in nearby Whitney said they were coming out of the woodwork in her house as fast as her husband vacuumed up piles of them from the floor. They smelled awful. We know, of course, ladybugs are very useful insects, consuming aphids, mites, thrips and other plant parasites and that here in the south the invasion of a new brand of aphids not only closed SkyDome for a Blue Jay's game, because the players were inhaling them, but, more seriously, have made inroads on this year's soybean crop.
More aphids equals more ladybugs.
But up north, where the soybeans are far between, they take a more sinister view. On the other hand, Algonquin stands as a monument to nature's sturdy withstanding of man's messing. And yet, we discovered, this was once the route of the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, one of the busiest lines in the country and the heart of a logging and industrial empire worth tens of millions. The last trains ran in the 1950s. Hardly a trace of its vanished corporate king.