In the summertime there’s nothing quite like a family picnic or backyard barbecue, but unfortunately – there are a swarm of insects that enjoy these festive gatherings as much as we do! The first key to controlling these uninvited guests is to know what attracts them so you can avoid having those things in your outdoor dining area.
Insects generally enjoy the same things that you and your guests do: the food. Bees are drawn by anything sweet and sugary, either liquid or solid, but yellow jackets and wasps like meat – of any kind. Flies and ants don’t discriminate, they like any and all kinds of food, and mosquitoes actually prefer you as their main course.
Though this may sound like you should just give up and go inside to eat, there are a number of things to do that can make al fresco dining the lovely experience it’s meant to be.
- Try to keep sources of garbage either indoors, or as far from the picnic area as possible as well as tightly covered, and use an odor-dispelling plastic garbage bag.
- There are a number of attractive plastic food domes and covers that can be used to protect and hide the food underneath while it’s on the table or being cooked.
- Rather than open glasses, serve beverages in bottles or covered cups.
- Make sure there are no areas of stale or stagnant puddles of water anywhere around your eating area.
- Bug zappers may produce a small but disturbing sound, but they do what they say they do – they zap bugs.
- Citronella candles repel mosquitoes, and bug lights – those yellow light bulbs – don’t actually repel bugs, but they don’t attract as many as bright lights do.
- There are now a number of new bug repellants that can be hooked to a person’s belt to provide a shield against mosquitoes; several of these can be placed around the dining area.
- Interestingly, wasps don’t like cucumbers. So cut up some cucumber slices and leave them around your picnic or barbecue area.
- Hang a crumpled brown paper bag or two on strings and then attach the strings to a nearby tree or post; hanging there, it will look like a wasp’s nest. Wasps are territorial, and if they see what looks like another colony of wasps, they’ll go away. Many hardware stores now actually carry faux-looking wasp nests for this purpose.
- There are non-toxic wasp traps that can be hung slightly outside the eating area that will attract wasps to them first, and not your food. They use pieces of meat or other food inside a compartment that the wasps will crawl into and become trapped.
- Finally, not to be a dreary killjoy, but bright clothing, decorations, and table clothes all attract the above insects, as do flowery scents, so you might want to gently advise your guests to ditch the perfume and leave their Hawaiian shirts at home.
