Overwintering stinkbugs navigate like nine-year-olds in bumper cars, making as much noise as possible and banging into everything in sight: walls, doors, windows, humans.

A class of pesticides known as pyrethroids, which are used to control native stinkbugs, initially appeared to work just as well on the brown marmorated kind—until a day or two later, when more than a third of the ostensibly dead bugs rose up, Lazarus-like, and calmly resumed the business of demolition.