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Picture the scene — it’s a beautiful clear evening, you’re enjoying a glass of crisp water when all of a sudden, a flying insect buzzes past you. It swarms around your face as you begin lifting your hand to swat it away, only to find that it’s left only to join a dozen of its pest friends by an outdoor light. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Bugs can be a major nuisance at night, but why are they attracted to light, and how can you avoid unsightly swarms?

Why Flying Bugs Are Attracted to Artificial Light

By reducing the amount and/or changing the color of outside light, you can drastically reduce the attraction of insects and other pests to the home. One of the three most common long-distance attractants to insects is lighting. These insects navigate by keeping themselves aligned at a certain angle relative to a light source as part of a phenomenon known as dorsal light response. Night-flying insect species navigate by moon and starlight to maintain their sense of direction and balance, but exterior lighting confuses them.

Artificial lighting is brighter to them than natural sources and radiates light on all sides. Since your lighting emits light in multiple directions, the insect simply cannot keep the light source at a constant angle, as it does with the moon. Plus, artificial light sources are much closer than stars and the moon, which may impact an insect’s perception of what light to follow at night.

Besides insects, many other pests will visit your home to feast on the abundance of insects. Frogs, spiders, and bats are just a few potential pests that can set up shop at your home. They can reduce the number of bugs attracted to light on your property, but many people do not want them to impact their homes, either.

Tips for Reducing Nocturnal Insects by Outdoor Lights

After sunset, go outside and slowly walk around your house, looking for where artificial lights are positioned, the color of light they produce, and any light escaping from inside your house to the outside. To ensure that your home isn’t a magnet to insects, here are some light management tips you can implement around your home to make it less of a night-time attraction.

Any kind of white light (including fluorescent or incandescent, mercury vapor, halogen, and LED) should not be used within 50 feet of a home at night. The best kind of lights to use on the home’s exterior near entryways (a porch light, for example) is yellow fluorescent or yellow LED lights. The best place to mount such lights is on the hinged side of the door so that its light will shine minimally to the inside of your home when the door is opened. If you need to light large exterior areas for security reasons, use high-pressure sodium lights, which are the least attractive to insects. This includes lighting the yard/grounds around your home which is best done by mounting high-pressure sodium vapor lights on stand-alone poles. Many people with basement garage entrances mount this light high up on the gable.

Many people choose to use mercury vapor lights because they are less expensive to buy than sodium vapor lights. However, while sodium vapor lights do cost more per light, they are actually cheaper to run. So, you will reach a breakeven point on the cost.

Keep white light from escaping from the inside of your home since all white light will attract insects. Inspect each outside door, including any garage doors, and add or repair weather seals or install door brushes to stop the light from leaking out. You should also install less attractive LED lights inside near windows and doors to reduce the number of night-flying insects seeking/attempting to come inside. Finally, by tinting the windows on doors, much less light shines through the door so it isn’t as attractive to insects, but you can still see the people inside or activity outside.

It should be noted that screens with whose mesh is small enough to keep out most insects are so tightly woven that they often limit visibility as to interfere with seeing out and will impede air flow. However, since regular window screens will keep out the larger flying insects, they are valuable tools. So, all windows should be properly screened if they can be opened.

Performing an exterior night-time light inspection of your home can reveal many things about your home. This inspection can tell you why your home is attractive to night-flying insects, how to decrease its attractiveness, how to reduce the number of these insects that manage to find a way to enter your home, and how they are getting into your home.