Nevada Burning Man Festival Bugging Out Over Insect Swarms

Instead, there’s an infestation of bugs. A good-sized green bug fell to the ground.

Similar to cicadas, seed bugs have an exponential increase in population every few years, which is why there were no reports of any bugs like these in previous years. Some people compare the smell to a coriander. Plus, there are steps you can take to both protect yourself from the bugs and the bites they leave. He was also a founding member of Black Rock Solar, which provides low-cost energy services to clients in the nonprofit, public, low-income and educational sectors.

While the bugs seemed to appear mysteriously out of nowhere in Black Rock City, experts say a recent rain likely led to the large number of insects’ arriving at the campground. On the festival’s website people can find the 10 principles of Burning Man such as participation, immediacy, not leaving any trace, decommodification, civic responsibility, communal effort, gifting, radical self-reliance, radical inclusion and radical self-expression. They’re tiny, so it’s not as grisly as it sounds, but it feels like a bug bite and leaves a welt.

Another entomologist, Karl Magnacca of the University of Hawaii, thinks there are actually two other species here along with Nysius, one of which is probably in the family Miridae. They also tend to poke their proboscises into the skin, which hurts. Pollack believes that the bugs will go away before the festival really starts. They’re all over the Man Base. “He will be missed by all who knew him”, the Burning Man Blog stated.

“If they get in your food, well, that’s a little bit of mustard flavoring”, Yanega says.

So why are the bugs invading this year’s Burning Man when they’ve not infested the festivities in the past? The Twitterverse has been abuzz (pun fully intended) leading up to the annual “burn”, and earlier this week one of the organizers, John Curley, confirmed the bug rumors on the Burning Man blog. Due to unseasonably wet weather, the grass on the hills is unusually verdant, and that’s resulted in more bugs showing up in the desert than usual. The desert, which is about 150 miles north of Reno, will transform into the Burning Man “Black Rock City” on August . 31. “A lot of these things last only a week or two”.