Brad Werlin, owner of Village Car Wash near Spanish Springs, said cars stained with love bugs began arriving at his business early this week. That means the swarms that cover windshields and splatter front bumpers won’t be far behind.

Love bugs aren’t really bugs at all, but actually are black flies. They get their nickname because they’re always seen attached in male-female pairs, mating as they fly.

They’re also known as March flies, even though they don’t appear until late April and May, and are closely related to mosquitoes and gnats. Besides the spring outbreak, love bugs show up again in late August to September.

During the adult stage, they have just three to four days before they die to mate, feed, disperse and deposit eggs. Each female lays 100 to 350 eggs. Males grab the females as they fly up from vegetation and sometimes several males try to mate with the same female.

They don’t bite or sting, but they are a great nuisance in numbers. Hundreds of thousands of them swarm along major highways and they can clog car radiators, causing overheating. They can overwhelm truck refrigeration units, causing the units to malfunction.

For most people, however, the biggest concern is that crushed love bugs, which are highly acidic, can eat away at a car’s paint if left too long.

“The only way to get love bugs off is elbow grease,” Werlin said. “A protectorant (wax) is not a preventative product, but it can help limit the damage.”

He recommends that drivers keep their cars waxed during love bug season so the bugs will be easier to remove.

He doesn’t think much of other solutions. Spraying the front of a car with a cooking spray or rubbing it with baby oil can make the bugs easier to remove, but Werlin said it’s difficult to remove these products after they’ve baked in the sun.

Some people say a damp sheet of fabric softener can be used to remove the bugs, but Werlin said he’s not sure whether it removes the paint as well.

Northerners often know nothing about love bugs until they arrive in Florida and car dealers don’t mention them. Werlin said he’s had some northern customers who were very surprised when swarms of bugs stained their new cars.

Here are a few tips for reducing the mess and damage from love bugs from the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences:

  • Place a large bug screen outside the car’s grille or a smaller screen inside the grille to keep bugs off the radiator.
  • Travel at night when the love bugs are resting. They fly only in daylight from about 10 a.m. to dusk.
  • Slow down and the car will hit fewer bugs.

Love bugs first appeared in Florida in 1947, after spreading eastward from Louisiana. The bugs include one native species and one invasive species that was brought on cargo ships from South America to New Orleans. Now, they are found across the southeast from South Carolina to Texas.

Due to their sudden appearance in Florida, false stories were spread that the bugs were the result of a genetic experiment gone wrong at the University of Florida. According to the stories, a genetic researcher crossed a fly with a mosquito and the creation escaped into the wild.

In their larval stage, love bugs are beneficial to the environment. Eggs are deposited in decaying vegetation, which the immature bugs eat and enrich the soil.

That benefit, however, isn’t much comfort to drivers this time of year when the bugs begin to swarm. Werlin said it’s important to remove dead bugs from cars within 48 hours.