Bug out!

[robinbloke]

Once again it's thunderbug season; once again thousands of pesky little flying black bugs get everywhere I have three lodged between the layers of my LCD screen monitor at home and I have no idea how to get rid of them.

Every year about the same time, zillions of the pests.

Or how many exactly? Lets see, shall we kids?

With a quick check of the surrounding area I estimate at least one bug per 20 cm³ area, and that's being conservative. Which means in your average 1m³ area thats about 5x5x5 = 125 bugs.

We'll assume these little sods have no more than, say, a flying height of 5 metres - correct me if I'm wrong here. And let's hope I am and it's less or you people in high rise flats will have to worry about them too.

According to the CIA the UK composes approximately 241,590 km² of land mass, of which 23.23% is arable land.

Now, I'll assume that these little sods are mostly confined to this otherwise I'm going to get nowhere. Plus this gives me something to assume and makes you city-folk feel better.

Where was I?

Right, anyway, this gives us 56,121.357 km² of land for these little pests to infest; which each km² having 125x1000² of them, ie. about 125 million.

Spanning this out across the UK this gives us around 7 billion bugs (A UK Billion - that is - that's twelve zeros kids)

Not forgetting, of course, our ceiling limit of 5 metres from earlier which gives us a grand total approximation of 35 billion (35,075,848,125,000) small flying annoying little sods and no doubt growing every year.

Now compare this to the UK population of 60,609,153 (July 2006 est.) this gives us 578,721 bugs per person in the UK.

Bloody hell, let's hope they don't get organised.

Comments

[whotheheckami.livejournal.com]

But how many can dance on a pinhead?

Perhaps if we can get them organised we can use them to make huge thrip/thunderbug 3-d animations across the countryside

[ev1ldonut.livejournal.com]

At my best I could never handle that many...

We need... [brief dramatic pause] The Man in Black!!!

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

They're largely an East Anglia thing, I think - I know we used to get them everywhere when I lived in Norfolk, but I've not seen them in other places I've lived (Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, London...) - even when you do see them elsewhere, it's just the odd one or two that have got lost, rather than the infestation that seems to hit across the fens & fields.

[mazzarc.livejournal.com]

And that's just one species of bug.... Humans are under this delusion that they "rule" and "own" this planet... stupid.

[becky-spence.livejournal.com]

Um....

What's a thunderbug?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I was going to write about thunderbugs last week, but then forgot to. They don't seem present in Southampton, but my arms were certainly covered in them when I was in Kent.

[briggsy.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I hate those things. I got a pile inside my LCD monitors last year which took ages to get out (there are still some in one I think, although they stopped walking around quite quickly - odd that, with a zonking great hot backlight just behind them). Never mind the small drifts of dead bugs on the window sills and anywhere else they get.

I'd never seen them before moving to Bar Hill, but I know why many houses have blinds instead of net curtains now ...

[scy11a.livejournal.com]

Hate to put your calcs awry, but I picked up several hundred on my nice clean shiny glider wings yesterday at altitudes up to 5,000ft : P
Really ruin my glider performance..... If they would only stay to the bottom 5metres