Not all Milwaukee neighborhoods have fireflies, but those that do are pretty lit up right now with flying, blinking "bugs" looking for love. (More on that later.)

I’ve lived in a few Milwaukee neighborhoods/suburbs – Shorewood, Riverwest and Rufus King – but it wasn’t until I moved to Walker’s Point almost a decade ago that I saw so many lightning bugs, or what others call fireflies. It's a regional thing. 

A quick search on Google provided a font of fascinating info about these pyrotechnic lil' guys and inspired me to track down a local entomologist to find out more.

Thelma Heidel-Baker is the scientist in residence at Riveredge Nature Center and holds a Ph.D. in entomology. She says the places with the most fireflies have the most firefly-friendly habitats, which include waterways/moist areas, vegetation, tress and the the right creatures – mainly slugs – for them to feed on.

In Wisconsin, according to Heidel-Baker, there are three kinds of fireflies: daytime fireflies (they do not glow or flash), night fireflies that do flash and glowworms, non-flying female fireflies that live on the soil, and they live here all year ‘round but are in larvae form for 1-2 years and only emerge as full-on fireflies in the summer.

Heidel-Baker also contributed to the list of five fun facts about fireflies, so if you wanna geek out for a minute, here we go:

• Fireflies do not sting, bite or carry disease.
• They blink as part of their mating ritual and to attract mates. The males usually flash first and then wait for the females to flash back.
• The lights also ward off predators because the chemicals that create the bioluminescence are unappealing and/or harmful.
• Fireflies are a type of beetle with more than 2,000 different species.
• There is not a confirmed firefly season in Wisconsin, but they appear sometime in June and are gone usually by mid- to late-August.