Unseasonal fruit flies drive us all bananas

IS IT global warming? In these middle weeks of October, we have had fruit flies everywhere about the house, and even mosquitoes here and there.

They are the real early-warning mosquitoes, as encountered in the tropics, the kind which, just as you’re dropping off to sleep signal their arrival with a high-frequency whine close to the ear, telling you that you are on tonight’s menu and that there’s not a lot you can do about it short of turning the bedclothes into a tent and spending the night like an overheated Bedouin.

I haven’t been bitten yet — but they’re there, waiting, I know. There are 33 species of mosquitoes in these islands. Most do not bite people but of the biters, the most painful is the aptly named Culex pipiens molestus, for molest us they surely do. Happily, they are less common than Culiseta annulata, the main biting type, whose banded black-and-white legs are a ‘dead giveaway’, so to speak.