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WEST VALLEY CITY -- If something's been bugging you lately, welcome to the club. A lot of people have been bugged lately by, well, by tiny little bugs -- hordes of them.
The bugs are flitting about pretty much all over the Salt Lake area, but the heart of the bug invasion seems to be Magna and West Valley City.
They're so tiny the light has to be just right, otherwise you might not see them -- even when clouds of them are roiling around you.
They land on your clothes, fly up your nostrils and walk all over your plants. For days, complaint calls have been flooding in at the Magna Mosquito Abatement District.
"On Thursday it was pretty bad. About, oh, every five to 10 minutes, just [calls] about these little bugs that have been bothering people," said Ryan Lusty, manager at the Magna Mosquito Abatement District. "They've talked about, like, their windshields and stuff. They're just covering people's windshields and everything. The people that have called, they say they've lived here for 35 years and never seen anything like it."
#woolly_aphid
Under the microscope, they've been identified as woolly aphids. They don't bite and they don't carry disease, but they're bad enough in Steve Krauel's West Valley yard to keep the family confined to the home.
"You'll walk through them, and then they'll just be all over your clothes," Krauel said. "For about two hours after, you feel like they're crawling all over you. You're always swatting at things whether they're there or not."
No one is sure why the aphids are so numerous and so busy this year, but the best guess is they'll be gone as soon as cool weather hits.
In fact, they may have already peaked. It seems as though the complaint calls started dropping off after Thursday. Either the bugs are declining or people are just getting used to them.
E-mail: jhollenhorst@ksl.com
