Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to train a dragonfly. Which is too bad, since they can keep large biting insects away. It would be nice to have a dragonfly sitting on your shoulder. Particularly on those days when there are lots of deer flies and horse flies around.
Horse flies and deer flies don’t like dragonflies. This could be due to the fact that dragonflies like to eat them.
There area lot of different dragonflies in the world. Like about 3000 different species. They’ve been around for millions of years, which has given humans the chance to name most of them. They come in numerous different sizes, shapes and colours and seem relatively friendly. Although if you harass them enough, they will bite a human, but usually only if they feel threatened.
Watching dragonflies can be fairly entertaining. Just trying to figure out all the different colours can be a challenge.
But the important part is, they are predators. They eat other insects. They do this as a nymph, swimming around in the water, which some species do for up to five years. They also do it as adults. Although they generally only live a few weeks as an adult.
This is the problem with training them. One won’t last the summer, so you would be spending all your time training them to protect you.
But still, the prospect of keeping deer and horse flies at bay makes it interesting. While black flies and mosquitoes are far more numerous, deer flies and horse flies have much larger teeth. Or seem to. They can bite through clothing and it hurts. When they bite, you know you’ve been bit.
So having a dragonfly around would come in handy, seeing as how deer flies and horse flies will avoid a dragonfly.
Thankfully, there are some pretty good fake dragonflies around you can stick to yourself to fake out the horse flies and deer flies. That’s a good thing. I’m thinking training a dragonfly to hang around you all summer wouldn’t be easy.
