The love bug" (also known as the honeymoon fly, telephone bug, double-headed bug, united bug, and March fly) is a nuisance any Florida motorist is unhappily more than passingly familiar with. Though these bugs neither bite nor sting, at certain times of the year their sheer numbers transform these innocuous insects into airborne hordes seemingly determined to devil anyone fool enough to take to the road. The adults splatter on windshields, lights, grills, and radiators of motor vehicles, and their dried remains are hard to remove. Suicidal pairs of love bugs have been known to cause overheating of motors when large numbers of them are drawn into the cooling systems of liquid-cooled engines. Unlike other bugs, something particular to them adversely affects the paint jobs on cars, pitting and etching the paint if their mortal remains are left on a vehicle for more than 48 hours.
Every May and September these sex-crazed critters become an annoyance bordering on intolerable as the air teems with mating pairs. But the "love bugs" haven't always been part of the Floridian landscape, thus we've seen an abundance of "mad scientist" stories about how the state came to be infested with them. (Love bugs are not solely a Floridian plague; they range throughout the Gulf states and into Mexico and Central America, as well as up into Georgia and South Carolina. But they seem particularly enamored of Florida.)
Truth is, Mother Nature is far more to be feared than any mad scientist and is far more capricious. In this case, she inspired some of her children to migrate to a new area, and in doing so prompted the creation of a number of rumors which attempt to explain why these critters came to take up residence in places where they weren't found before.
Love bugs are not the result of a genetic cloning experiment gone wrong, nor were they unwittingly loosed from a research facility charged with studying exotic insects. They also weren't bio-engineered as a natural solution to the mosquito problem. (Love bugs do not eat mosquitos: the adults do not eat at all, and larvae feed on decaying plant material.) These overly amorous critters are native to Central America; the best guess as to how they came to these United States places them as undiscovered stowaways who arrived by ship in Galveston or New Orleans around 1920. They migrated into Florida in 1947 from Louisiana, looked around, liked what they saw, and decided to stay. Their natural capacity for reproduction took care of the rest.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/lurkers/lovebugs.htm
Just one of those things you have to deal with while living in Florida!
They're more like the size of two flies stuck together, but they are that black---you can't miss them.
