In my neck of the woods they're mostly called lightning bugs. Lots of flashing going on out there tonight!

Would a Rose by any other name smell as sweet? Same thing.

We see one occasionally, tons when I was little in east Houston

When I was a little bugger my dad would catch a bunch of them and bring them into my room in a jar. I'd watch them until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer.

They only light on the way up.

They’re Lightning Bugs around here.
The fields around home are just now beginning to sparkle with them. Another few days there’ll be billions of them.
One of the many things I love about living here in the sticks!
At sunset, I set on the deck watching the bunnies play and the fields light up.
7mm

Lightning Bugs.

Lots of them when I was a kid, gradually it seemed we saw less.
Over the last number of years numbers seem better.

Lightning Bugs.

Lightnin' Bugs for sure.

Kids called em blinky bugs

Same thing. I call them what they are... Lampirids (Family: Lampiridae)

we have the beetle-type lightning bugs.

Lightin’ bugs.

Lightning bugs here in the peoples republik of Con-ecticut.

Fire flies.

There was a website where they'd ask you a bunch of questions like this, and based on your answers, it would pinpoint your place of origin. Firefly vs. Lightning Bug was one of the questions. I took the test. The results pretty well pegged me as being from Cincinnati, but there were some flyers. Cincinnati folks call them fireflies. I call them lightning bugs.

When I looked back on the flyers, each one related to a place where my mother had lived as a child. Grandpa was a traveling engineer and Mom lived in something like 13 cities in 12 years growing up. Lightning bugs, according to the website, would have entered Mom's vocabulary from a stint in Dayton, Ohio at age 8.

Dad grew up here but spoke German until he started school. His term for them was glow worms (Glühwürmchen). When he said it there was a peevishness in his tone, like he knew better, but he wasn't going to give in. You could still see the little kid in him, refusing to say firefly.

This^^^


and lightnin bread

Supposedly a few exist here in Idaho but I've never seen one here. It's too dry through most of the high desert states.

What you call them depends on where you are.

Figures

buncha cous cous hummus eatin fàgs

Last night they[lightning bugs] were synced up like 6 Dykes sharing an apartment, down in my field.

Lightning bugs. We have lots of em here.

Neither

All I ever heard growing up was lightning bugs

As a kid we called them lightning bugs. I dont think we have them where I live now.

Both, but more often, Lightnin’ bugs. Around here they start showing about this time of year.

They've always been called Lightning Bugs around here, yet our semi-pro baseball team is called the Fireflies. BTW, I always had little water turtles as a kid. They'd eat any bug I threw into their aquarium, except Lightning Bugs. They must taste bad...

There are over 130 species of the critters. In addition, there are many other light emitting insects that aren't beetles, making over 2000 total species of flashers.

We started seeing lightning bugs about 4 weeks ago. It's like seeing intermittent flashing icicle lights the last few nights. The June bugs haven't shown up yet, though, and they don't have much time left in this month . . .

All of the ones I have seen are Lightning Beetles often called bugs. Kind of like a lot of people call June Beetles -June Bugs. The hard shell covered wings are beetles, the soft exposed wings are bugs. Like Box Elder bugs etc!
The beetles are in the order Coleoptera, and bugs are in the order Hemiptera .
Just going by what I learned in my Entomology classes in 4H about 60+ years ago!
I suppose the insect orders have changed due to every insect being equal (woke)

Winner!

Lightning Bugs, used to chase them in the dark and try to catch before the light went out. Mash em in your hand and the guts would glow for a spell. Seem to remember there’s a formula to use for telling the temperature per the amount of blinks a minute.

I grew up hearing both but lightning bug is the more common term around here. I still see a lot of them around here on warm humid nights.

Same. I remember one dark night walk with my daughter. Going home I noticed that I must have stepped on a lightning bug because the remnants of it were easily seen on the sidewalk for about 50 yards. I was amazed.

We called them twinkle bugs.

If you are going to go latin on us you might as well spell Lampyridae correctly.

Lightening bugs.
Fire flies.

Crawdads, Crawdaddies, Crawfish, Crayfish, Mudbugs - all the same.

As kids in east Texas, we called them Lightening Bugs. A few folks called them Fireflies, but everybody knew what was being discussed.

In the summertime, we would catch them and put them in a jar.
The "winner" had the most, but we always turned them loose before going inside.