- Bugs. They're out there.
They live in our homes,
they crawl on our loved ones.
Oh, did you wanna have a picnic?
You are the picnic!
They can spread deadly diseases like Lyme,
dengue, yellow fever, and Zika.
Plus mosquito bites suck.
So keeping them away matters.
Several companies have tried to answer the question
of how to keep away bugs.
But do their solutions work?
(whoosh)
(bug buzzes) (slaps)
Let's start with one of the most popular.
Essential oil bug repellent.
It makes sense why so many people would want to use it.
They're natural, they have no adverse effect
on the environment.
And usually, they smell really nice!
They should be the perfect solution, right?
Wrong!
To get to the bottom of it,
we're talking to Doug Mahoney,
who not only has written about this stuff for years,
but also, he lives on a farm,
so he knows about it personally.
Hi Doug!
- Hi Dory!
I have a small farm, I have two cows, two pigs,
a bunch of sheep, a number of chickens, honey bees.
I deal with flies quite often.
Ticks are another thing that I'm constantly concerned with.
There's definitely a personal element to it,
about getting it right and finding the right products.
- What are essential oil repellents?
- Essential oils are basically
the distilled essence of a plant.
Many of them have been shown to have
a certain degree of insect repellency.
The most notable ones would be sort of,
probably citronella, catnip oil,
peppermint is another one.
So the EPA has basically created
the gold standard of repellency testing.
We've looked over their testing protocols
and it is incredibly detailed,
it's incredibly complex.
Very very thorough.
The way that essential oils are classified,
they do not fall under the purview of the EPA.
Whereas with a product that has DEET or picaridin,
which are both EPA approved repellents,
you have a very firm understanding of what you're getting,
of what kind of protection you're getting
against what insects,
and how long it's going to last.
- So I was gonna ask you how effective
essential oils are as repellents,
but based on that, is the answer basically
that we just don't have any way of knowing?
- Well, we don't have any way of knowing, officially,
but also, every indication is that they sort of
fall short of both of those questions anyway.
The way a mosquito sees the world,
they see it through a number of receptors,
up to or over 100 receptors.
Some deal with humidity, some deal with taste.
The way a repellent works is that
it blocks those receptors.
An essential oil repellent only will block
a limited number of those receptors,
whereas something like DEET or picaridin
will block a much wider range of those receptors.
DEET and picaridin are both synthetic compounds.
They've been studied extensively.
If you use it in accordance with how it is
described on the label, there really should be
no adverse health effects.
Essential oils are very volatile,
so they tend to disperse into the air very very quickly.
So they may last 15 minutes, it may last 20 minutes,
it may last two hours.
But again, going back to this lack of oversight,
and this lack of standardized testing,
there's absolutely no way to know.
- But, you know those citronella candles?
Do those work?
'Cause people love those.
- [Doug] They do not work.
There is no indication that they work beyond
the same as lighting a regular candle.
- Good that we have lots of bad options, so- (laughs)
- There is plenty of bad options.
- This is my house!
You don't even pay rent here!
Oh hi!
Didn't see you there.
I was just trying to kill this fly.
If only there were an easier way to get rid of them, huh?
Doug, what do you think about sticky traps
as a solution to have flies in your house?
- There is some effectiveness there,
they're really available in two different styles.
You can get 'em as a sheet
and you put 'em against your window.
Or you can get the kind that you hang from a nail
or your ceiling and you sort of pull down
and they uncoil and just hang there.
Of the two, the ones that are on the window
are probably gonna be a little more effective.
Bugs are gonna naturally be attracted to the light source.
The main drawback with those
is that they're just really gross.
You go through the effort of buying it
and putting it on your window or hang it from your ceiling,
and you're not gonna take it down
with just one or two bugs on it,
you're probably gonna wait until it's got like,
15 to 20 bugs on it.
By that time, it's pretty unsightly.
We've also had some problems with the window ones
getting the adhesive off.
Especially if it sits and bakes in the sun.
(dramatic classical music)
- Bug zappers are another really popular
pest control solution, which totally makes sense.
Because there's nothing cooler than harnessing
the power of electricity to zap your foes.
(thunder crashes)
The problem is, they might actually work too well.
- Bug zappers kill a lot of bugs.
But they kill basically all the wrong bugs.
One study was done that looked at
six bug zappers over a 10 week period,
and of the nearly 14,000 bugs that were killed,
31 of them were biting flies, which includes mosquitoes.
You're not killing the bugs that you're trying to kill,
but what's worse is the bugs that you actually are killing.
So you're killing your moths,
and moths are very prolific pollinators.
You're killing your parasitic wasps,
which are actually the small little insects,
totally harmless to humans.
They actually prey on other insects.
So if you have a garden,
you're thrilled with parasitic wasps around,
because they actually keep the pest population down.
So, not only do bug zappers not kill what you want,
but they completely destroy the bugs
that you do want around.
They're really bad.
Some people even attribute bug zappers
to the decline of songbirds in the suburbs.
Because their food sources are drying up,
and the same thing with bats.
But it doesn't kill the bugs that are bothering you.
Like, it doesn't kill mosquitoes.
It doesn't kill biting flies.
- Why isn't it killing mosquitoes with all the other ones?
- Well, mosquitoes aren't necessarily attracted to
the light.
- There's this really good scene from A Bug's Life
when one of the bugs goes into the bug zapper.
- Yeah, when it's like slowly ...
- Yeah, and there's like the other one watching it!
- [Bug] I can't help it!
It's so beautiful!
(crackle)
(scream)
- I mean that is just classic cinema.
What repellents do you actually recommend
that people use?
- What we recommend is a concentration of 20% picaridin,
and that should give you up to about 12 hours of protection.
From mosquitoes and ticks.
The one we like the most is Sawyer,
because it has a nice even spray,
it has a little double cap.
But really, anything that has the 20% concentration
of picaridin should do the trick.
We also recommend permethrin.
You approach it very differently,
what you do is you spray it on your clothing,
you do not spray it on your skin.
And you soak your clothing in it,
and you let it dry.
And then that piece of clothing is now protected from ticks.
- Let's say somebody wanted to
deal with a fly situation at home,
but they don't particularly like a bunch of dead fly corpses
like, in the home.
What would be another good option for them
besides the sticky traps?
- Probably just a fly swatter.
It's pretty quick, pretty efficient.
Minimal cleanup.
You just take it out when you need it,
you put it away when you don't need it.
It's not something you have to sort of live with
on a day to day basis like a sticky trap.
- Instead of bug zappers,
can you tell us about some of the mosquito control gear
that you do recommend?
- If you're just going outside to your back deck
or your patio,
there is a sort of category called spacial repellents.
And what they do is it's a small device
that emits a little bit of repellent
into an area, say a 10 by 10 area or a 10 by 12 area.
And it sort of protects everything within that area.
The one we like is by a company called Thermacell.
It's called a Radius, it has a little rechargeable battery
that sort of heats up an element
and disperses the repellent.
An easy solution that many people already have
is to just go outside and to set up a fan.
Mosquitoes are extremely weak fliers.
They tend to fly lower.
So if you set up a fan kind of knee level, around there,
and just get some air moving,
mosquitoes won't be able to come and get you.
- There are plenty of products out there
that promise to eliminate bugs, and fancy gimmicks
that promise they have the perfect solution.
But when it comes to really keeping away bugs,
we think it's best to stick to the tried and true methods.
- [Man] I have a very small apartment and like seriously-
- I respect that, no, I really like that-
- [Man] Yeah (mumbles).
- Yeah.
(background chatter)
You're like Daniel Day-Lewising this
and I appreciate that.
You care.
- [Man] Okay.
- [Woman] Okay, one, two, three, go!
- It's a light!