Winter can be cold, and most of us look forward to the arrival of the warm days of summer. But one unwelcome aspect of the change of the seasons is the arrival of flies and other insect pests. Having overwintered in cracks and crevices, they come out to feed and breed. Within weeks the relatively small number that have survived the cold will have laid literally thousands of eggs, and what seemed like a minor nuisance in early spring will have become an all but unstoppable plague.
Obviously the time to strike is before this stage is reached, but how?
One tried and trusted method is to lure flying insects into traps. Plants like Venus flytraps and pitcher plants have been successfully employing this technique for millions of years, using scent to attract their prey. But a kitchen or restaurant environment presents such a plethora of attractive odours that flies are unlikely to respond to such a lure. We need another attractant and fortunately one is available: ultraviolet light.
Insects find ultraviolet light irresistible, and what’s more they see light in this range of the spectrum far more clearly than we do. So a light trap that looks small and discreet to us looks like a flaming beacon to them. Using this fact, it is possible to install one or more light traps in a kitchen or restaurant without them being obvious. The insects are then killed, either through electrocution on a grid, or by becoming trapped on ultra-sticky fly paper. The latter method is preferred since it avoids the risk of insects “exploding” upon striking the electric grid, and spraying the surrounding area with bits of extremely unwelcome detritus!
A wide range of BRC Insect Light Traps are available from BRC NZ or ALPECO Ltd. Designed in France to comply with European food hygiene standards and CE safety rated, their long-lasting (15,000 hours) bulbs ensure many months of effective fly control. And installing them now, before flies reach plague proportions, will ensure their effectiveness.
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