The Bug Report for today is HORRENDOUS and that is for everywhere and every place in the NWT. The only place, where you might be safe, is cruising at twenty knots in the middle of Great Slave Lake. But don't slow down.
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Complaining about the bugs is a common Northern pastime and they are bad this year, but they have been just as bad or worse and they can certainly get even worster. Call it an old bush superstition but when I hear someone say "things can't possibly get any worse", I cringe because I know they can. By saying it you are sort of tempting the bush spirits and Mother Nature to show you that you are wrong. Flies are like Olympians; they are out to win and set new records.
I am glad products like KILL EM ALL aren't available to the general public or the flies might take a real beating and remember mosquitoes are the bottom of the food chain. They feed fish, birds, and a whole range of critters and plants. So, without them we would be in trouble. So, I say lets get on the food chain, turn the tables on the flies and start eating them.
All we have to do is start harvesting them on a commercial scale.
Maybe with fly catching windmills or solar powered vacuums. I looked it up and one mosquito weighs 2.5 milligrams and contains 0.01 calories.
So, to get your 1000 calories a day you would have to eat 100,000 of them. Which is about the size of the horde that attacked me at the boat launch last week on a hot and rainy day. It was horrendous when we pulled ashore and got ambushed.
A bunch were biting my head and buzzing all around, no doubt trying to befuddle me. Then they were biting and landing on my hands, arms, legs. We just had to endure, work through it until we could get in the truck and get moving. It was more than we were prepared for.
So put a collector there and you should be able to produce several thousand calories a day of processed mosquitoes. You could turn them into breakfast cereal, a sandwich spread for lunch and patties for grilling for dinner. A new wonder food just waiting for the North to start harvesting and processing.
It could give the North food security. It could be an export product and reduce our deficit. In time it could replace the diamond mines because mosquitoes are everywhere.
Every Northern community could get involved and it would create hundreds of seasonal jobs. Hunt and fish in the winter and harvest mosquitoes all summer long.
Volunteers could even offer to feed them to insure a great crop and summer harvest.
Why has no one thought of this before. You could make speciality products like blackfly jam, bulldog steaks, and teriyaki mosquito pate. A mosquito's life cycle is a week or two, depending on the species and conditions so they aren't hard to raise and just keep coming as long as the weather permits. They are a truly renewable resource.
So let's harvest them and make the North happy, prosperous, healthy and wise.