They say that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So if you want to prevent stink bugs from invading your home, then you need to know what attracts stink bugs, and figure out how to mitigate the risk of an infestation by preparing your environment accordingly. In doing so, you will be able to play the game and stay one step ahead of them, and take the necessary preemptive measures in order to exterminate those bugs that have already found their way into your home as well as keeping additional bugs from coming in.
So having said that, what attracts stink bugs? Here is a list of the most common things:
1. Fruit
Stink bugs are one hundred percent pure vegetarians. They feed on fruits and vegetables exclusively. If you leave a bowl of fresh fruit out on the kitchen table in your home, you can be sure that sooner or later, if there are any stink bugs dwelling within the four walls of your home, they will eventually make their way to your fruit bowl and begin to help themselves and feast upon it.
Or if you have a garden where you are growing fresh produce, in the back yard of your home, you can be sure to find stink bugs there, if there are any to be found.
The same applies, obviously, to a farm. If you are growing fruits or vegetables on your farm, you have to be vigilant against the potential looming threat of stink bugs descending upon your crops and eating them, thereby resulting in the loss of resalable food.
2. Light
Like many other species of insects, stink bugs are attracted to sources of light. That is why you will very often find stink bugs that are already inside your home flocking toward your windows during the day time. They want to get out into the sunlight.
Likewise, that is why you will find many stink bugs from outside perched on your window screens at night. That is because they are trying to get inside your house, where they see that the lights are on within your home.
3. Heat
In addition to light, stink bugs are also attracted to sources of heat. (So the two often go hand in hand – light and heat.) This, in fact, is the primary reason why stink bugs are trying to invade our interior spaces – our homes and our offices and other indoor buildings and places, in the first place:
They are instinctively seeking out warmth. You may have noticed that stink bugs are most prevalent during the onset of the autumn months. That is because as the temperature begins to cool, they start making preparations for the winter by seeking out a warm place to take refuge in. And once they are able to detect that our homes are sources of heat, they will do whatever it takes to get inside.
And many of us know doubt can attest to the fact that these little buggers are extremely persistent when it comes to trying to get into our homes. They will do whatever it takes. They will find any crack or any gap in our windows, doors, foundations, outside air vents, chimneys, or what have you, until they are able to somehow get inside.
4. Aggregation Pheromones
If you have ever seen stink bugs in clusters, that is because they are social insects by nature. They emanate what is known as an aggregation pheromone, in an effort to alert other bugs of the same species of their presence, and thereby invite or attract them towards themselves. When others detect this pheromone, they will instinctively flock toward it, honing in on the source of the scent, until they meet the rest of their kind. Hence, the term aggregation.
This pheromone is not to be confused with the pungent odor that they emanate as a means of self-defense when they are attacked or threatened. That is entirely different than this pheromone.
So now that we have an idea of what attracts stink bugs, the next step is to figure out how we can use this knowledge to our advantage, in order to play the game and stop them dead in their tracks.
One approach to take would be to figure out how you can strategically place any of these sources of attraction, such as fruit, light, and heat, in an area whereby you can set up a trap…. You can use any of these items as bait to lure stink bugs toward it, and then trap them.
For example, if you set out a bowl of fruit in the kitchen, and you find stink bugs flocking toward it, you can then trap the bugs in the bowl by covering it with an air tight lid. This is just one example of how you could set up a trap, based on your knowledge of what attracts stink bugs.
Another example might be to set up a traditional bug light zapper outside on your back yard patio. Because stink bugs are attracted to sources of light, if they see this light in your back yard at night, they will quite naturally be drawn toward it… and of course once they make contact, they won’t be bugging you any more (pun intended).
Or, you can use light as a means to lure stink bugs out of your house. You can turn on your patio lights or set up a bug zapper outside of your house, and turn off all of the lights inside your house. Keep your doors or your windows open, and let the stink bugs fly out, toward the source of light.
And as for how you can use stink bug aggregation pheromones to your advantage, there are a couple of ways you can approach this:
You can let nature take its course. Stink bugs will naturally be drawn to one another. So once you’ve got one stink bug trapped or lured toward where you want it to be, you can be assured that it is only a matter of time before other stink bugs will also descend upon that place.
Or, you can purchase a commercially available stink bug aggregation pheromone spray and use it as a means to lure stink bugs toward it. There are a number of commercial products available whereby the chemical composition of this pheromone has been synthesized and reproduced and packaged into aerosol spray cans which can be used as a form of “bug spray”.
All you have to do is simply spray it into the area on or near the trap that you want to lure them into – this could be a container, a strip of fly paper, or any place where you know you could easily reach them and vacuum them up if you were to choose to do so.
Let’s learn more about how we can use the knowledge of what attracts stink bugs to our advantage.