All About Fireflies
Listen 00:53:28
Are you seeing fewer fireflies each season? On this week’s You Bet Your Garden, we’ll devote the entire hour to the fascinating creatures we call fireflies and lightning bugs – and what you can do to help them shed more light on your summer nights.
Question of the Week:
Most listeners who write in about fireflies/lightning bugs just report that they seem to see fewer of them each summer. But back in 2011 (soon after we did our first big Question of the Week about the wonderful bio-luminescent creatures), Sharon in South Brandon, Florida (just west of Tampa) wrote: “Is it possible to purchase larvae to reintroduce lightning bugs to an area? We have many wonderful boggy, natural areas that would provide a good home for lightning bugs. Is it possible to purchase their larvae to ‘seed’ this area again? They once were prolific here, and I suspect that many years of spraying for fruit fly control did them in. But today there’s not an orange grove in sight—so maybe they’d have a better chance now.”
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