All my kids played violin when they were very small. Their teachers told them they must practice every day because if they left their bow in the nice dark case for too long, bow bugs would get in and eat the bow.
Bow bugs. Yeah Right. That ranks right up there with the tooth fairy. Except for one of my kids decided after freshman year that he'd had enough of the viola and put it away. About a year later, someone needed to borrow a bow and I knew there was a perfectly good bow with the viola. So I took it out and discovered, to my shock, that the majority of the bow hairs were severed as neatly as if someone had cut them with a razor blade. I asked all the kids who cut the viola bow hair and why. They were all dumbfounded. My kids do dumb things like kick tortilla chips under their beds and then wonder why they get mice, or forget their wet laundry in the washer, but this didn't really seem like anything any of them would do for any reason.
It turns out that there really are bow bugs. They're called anthrenus museorum. I already knew you should ideally store unused stringed instruments and bows in the open, but with a big family it just seemed safer in the case. You learn something every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment