Who Ya Gonna Call? - Bug Busters!

The bugs in West Virginia are loving life this spring.  It was a mild winter and every sort of tiny creature got a head start.  The vast majority of the bugs are quite innocuous.  They go about their bug-business quite unconcerned about the presence or absence of humans.  Fortunately we get very few mosquitoes.  We are a little to high in elevation and a little to far from any sources of stagnant water to have a big mosquito problem.  There are ants everywhere, however, and certainly more types of beetle than I have ever seen in one place before.  In fact, it brings to mind the statement attributed to the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane that God has "an inordinate fondness for beetles".  The only place where the bugs are a persistent problem is in our trailer.  At night they are of course attracted to the light and some bugs such as stinkbugs (a type of beetle) just like to crawl into enclosed spaces light or not.  To get rid of the bugs in the trailer we purchased a bug-zapper and set it up indoors despite the multitudinous lawyer-warnings on the package instructing us to use it only outdoors.  I think that is particularly idiotic.  I have no problem with the bugs outdoors.  Outdoors they can live free and be happy.  It is indoors where they are a problem.  I suppose the corporate lawyers were worried that they would be liable for fire or injury if some mishap were to occur due to the bug-zapper.  Actually, I think the lawyers got involved in this product at the engineering stage.  This device is not like the bug-zapppers of old that would make a nice spark when the hapless insect would enter its kill zone.  The thing is so safe it doesn't actually zap bugs at all;  the bugs are quite unharmed by it.  I really don't think you could start a fire with it if you shoved a kerosine soaked rag in it.  The only thing the unit actually does well is attract insects to it because it has a nice glowing blue light.  So like so many products that the irritating risk-adverse lawyer wimps of America have ruined, we had to modify it.  We thought about making it work like it should by giving it some real high voltage electronics but we discovered that we could achieve our bug elimination objective by exploiting the fact that bugs have very, very little brains.  Nick fashioned a bug trap from a soda pop bottle which he then affixed to the underside of the zapper.  The underside of the zapper is just a hole through which the dead bugs are supposed to fall once they have been zapped.  However, since the zapper doesn't actually kill them ( it might stun them a little since they do actually seem to fall through the hole rather than just hanging around the light at the top. ) live bugs come out the bottom where they just fly away again.  In our version, they enter the trap and can't get out.  It works much like a lobster pot; the bugs enter through a little hole in the middle and enter a big chamber and cannot figure out how to get back out through the little hole. They just stay there and eventually die.  It's actually surprisingly effective and we have been able to keep the trailer bug free.  We have been thinking about making a big version to see if it can catch lawyers.

Our modified bug zapper with the bug trap made from a soda bottle attached to the bottom.

After a couple of hours of operation we had already caught a number of stinkbugs.