Wednesday, February 9, 2011

How To Use Bats To Control Pests

By Sue Parker


When you are bitten by a mosquito, you will then know that there are hundreds or thousands of them living just within your residence. You most likely think it is time for you to do the necessary eradication process like fogging, pesticide spraying and using insect repellants. Unfortunately, those methods will kill few of the annoying insects and it could also endanger a person's health.

There are other options to get rid of those disease carrying insects. One is mounting a bat house. Opposing to old superstitions that they are bloodsucking mammals, bats feed mainly on insects rather than animals or humans. Bats can function as a safer insect control.

Insects can hatch millions of offspring in a single day. Imagine how they can be controlled with the use of pesticides alone. A single bat can consume up to 1000 insects in a night. How much more if you have a bat house that accommodates more than 5 bats, it can consume more than 5000 insects.

It is quite unfortunate that these bats are declining quite vigorously and almost 40 percent of the American species have now been declared to be declining rapidly, threatened or endangered. The insect population will start to increase if the bats keep on declining at this rate. Marked increase will also be there in toxic pesticides usage as a result.

There are ways to attract bats to your bat houses. You need to first have an appropriately planned bat house. Perfect bat houses draws attention to bats especially if those are created with the likeness of a real bat cave.

Living in the form of colonies is preferred by the bats. Hence it is often recommended to have bat house which is mid-sized. Colonies of around 100-300 bats are supported by such bat houses and the colony containing 300 bats can be a source of consuming 360,000 insects and mosquitoes in just one hour.

For having best results you should mount the bat house at some building or pole. If you mount these houses on some tree then they will less likely be populated so you should preferably mount it under eves and should also be exposed to sun as well. It is optimal to mount the bat house around 15-20 ft. above ground. Besides this the location should not also have any bright lights exposure in nights.

If you install a bat house insect population around the home of yours would be reduced. Besides this, this ecological resource which is very important will also be protected.




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