It took me a while to notice this. One of those “you don’t pick up on absences as fast” sort of things.

But here it is:

There are very few insects in Abu Dhabi City.

Which is bizarre. But I now am convinced of it, after five weeks in-country.

I took a 90-minute walk from the hotel/apartment to the Corniche, which runs along the Gulf … and in 90 minutes I saw not a single insect, aside from a few ants scurrying about (faster than American ants) in the greenbelt between the Corniche and the water. Little black ants.

I didn’t see a single flying bug. Not a butterfly or a moth or a bee or a wasp or a dragon fly.

I didn’t see anything creepy. Not one spider. No roaches.  No grasshoppers. I have yet to see (or hear) a cricket.

And this walk I took led me through some fairly skody residential-cum-business areas, where there is plenty of trash on the ground, lots of grease on the pavement … that is, seemingly perfect areas for insect inhabitation …

But almost no bugs.

I have no idea yet why this should be. If there are 700,000 people living in a hot, humid environment, shouldn’t we be nearly overrun by bugs?

Leah alleges to have seen a “monster” cockroach about a week ago. I would expect them to be here, as they were in Hong Kong … but I have yet to see my first roach. And I come home at night, and go through a dark, dirty alley to get to the front door of the hotel, and I ought to startle some roaches in the middle of their feeding.

But no.

In five weeks, I have not noticed more than a dozen house flies. I go days at a time without seeing a single fly. And when I do, I think, “Wow. Been a long time since I saw a fly.”

No butterflies. At all. (Maybe it’s not the season.) No moths. I have seen a handful of bees, tiny little things with narrower bodies than you would see in Europe or the Americas. About 99 percent of the bees I have seen were buzzing around the same two flower bushes outside an awful apartment I went to see. I wondered if they sting. It isn’t as if they followed me.

I saw a gnat last night, at the Indian restaurant. That’s gnat No. 1 in this country. It seemed to be interested in our food.

I’m wondering about how many fleas are here, too. Some quasi-feral cats hang around the newspaper offices, and they seem quite well-groomed. Not flea-bitten or anything.

So,  anyway … is the government just all over insects,  tamping down the population?

Do the people who live here hate insects so much they get right after them?

One possible answer is … this climate is so scalding that it’s difficult even for insects to thrive here. They would have to get inside an air-conditioned building, and that’s not easy. Especially one where people live.

Another answer? Maybe this just isn’t the season for insects. In the book “From Rags to Riches, a Story of Abu Dhabi,” author Mohammed al Fahim writes that in his youth the populace here was tortured in the summer by clouds of tiny mosquitos. “We were constantly brushing them from our face, but to no avail. They got in everyone’s eyes, particularly those of the children, causing painful infections that sometimes would eventually lead to blindness.” So maybe a plague of mosquitos — another insect I have yet to see a single individual of — is coming.

And perhaps I’ve just missed all the insect life, and I’ll find it when I move into a ground-level apartment. But for now, on the fifth floor, and at work, and just walking around … I am struck by how few insects there are in this town. Never seen anything like it.