Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, or maybe it was because it rained every day at the beginning of this month, but I didn’t see the first lightning bug here in Easley until June 11. And even then, there weren’t that many.

I recall that we always used to start seeing them before the end of May, and by this time there were so many of them flashing their little yellow taillights that it was a nonstop light-show every evening at dusk.

Like most kids back in the early 1960s, my brother and I used to take couple of Duke’s mayonnaise jars and punch holes in their lids with a nail and go out in the backyard on summer nights and run around catching the little guys. We imagined that we might be able to get enough of them in there to have a little lantern. We never generated much candlepower, but it wasn’t hard to nab quite a few of them, they were so abundant.

It’s not just my imagination that the population of lightning bugs is diminishing. A

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