It sounds pretty revolting to the majority of Westerners that many people around the world eat insects on a regular, even daily, basis. This is not always only because edible insects are so abundant and money is so scarce. In a lot of countries, some insects are considered a delicacy.

I am not an authority on edible insects in every country, but there are so many kinds of edible insects where I have been, that there must be similar edible insects in every country with the exception of the North and South Poles.

Eating insects may sound revolting to us, but I have met individuals who think that it is just as revolting to eat prawns, shrimps and lobsters. After all, they are merely insects of the sea of a kind. And just like eating shrimps or lobster, insects are either the main or only part of the dish. In other words, they are considered just as much a luxury as shrimps, prawns or lobster is in the West.

Insects are not consumed with rice, chips, in a sandwich or with a sauce. Rather insects are deep-fried in a wok and eaten from a paper bag like chips. Insects are not mixed when cooked either. You buy fifty grammes of one and fifty grammes of another and they are enjoyed separately.

Insects are abundant and they do not have to be bred, unlike cattle. One interesting fact is that beef is about 20% protein whereas insects are between 65% and 80% protein. Surprising, eh? 50 grammes of insects provides more protein that a half-pound beef steak and they have scarcely any cholesterol.

If you want to include insects in your diet, then you will need to study the subject with regard to your own country, but I will give some suggestions. In the insect world, yellow means ’stay away from me, I am poisonous or do not taste nice’, so it is best not to eat those ones. Most insectivores stay away from hairy insects too, so spiders and house flies are out as well. Mosquitoes are too small so are ticks and many other insects.

While some caterpillars can be eaten, some cannot, so leave them to the experts. The best insects to go for are beetles, termites, larvae, grubs, grasshoppers, crickets and some night-flying insects.

In Thailand, for example, most people will eat insects for a luxury, although some people eat them every day. In the north-east and in the north-west, people might eat insects once a month. In the centre, like Bangkok and Pattaya, fried insects are prepared on the streets, so they are readily available. They are eaten frequently in the south and in the east, which is known as Isaan.

However, all over Thailand, you can see ultraviolet lights over insect traps. These families will either consume the insects themselves or sell them on to a dealer. I have also seen individuals collecting a fly which only comes out at night after rainfall. You can gather thousands in an hour by putting a bowl of water under a street light. The insects become stunned by the light and spiral down into the water where they drown.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with indoor mosquito repellent. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Repellent For Dogs.

Have you ever heard of clothing that deters mosquitoes and other airborne insects? If not, I am prepared to bet that there have been times when you have wished you could get some. Mosquitoes and midges can wreck a holiday or even make you have to get out of your own garden when it begins getting dark.

There are various ways that you can combat mosquitoes and the other horrors of the twilight, but they always seem to find a place where I am not totally protected. Often that place is on the shoulder blade, where they will insert their proboscis through the material of your shirt to extract your blood.

I enjoy my garden, but so do the mosquitoes as there is a lot of open water in the surrounding area. My first line of defense against mosquitoes is to plant flowers and trees that they are known to hate the smell of. I think that the odour that they hate the most is that of lemons.

Therefore, we have a few small lemon trees, which will soon be playing a vital part in our defense, a patch of lemon grass for my wife’s favourite Thai curries and some as yet poorly-looking citronella plants. (I think that Thailand may be too hot for them, but I am hoping that they will become accustomed).

Then I have two mosquito lamps. The type that entice the insects to an ultraviolet light and then electrocutes them with 25,000 volts. They are very effective, but more so in the dark than at dusk, when they are probably less discernible to the insects. I am aware that there are insect lights that use smells or pheromones to lure mosquitoes, but I have not seen any for sale over here yet. I did once try a device that emits a sound on a high frequency that was alleged to drive them away, but it did not work on our mosquitoes.

In conclusion, if it was a bad night I used to put on some insect repellent ointment, often something that had DEET in it. This is pretty effective for a few hours, but it can damage some textiles and some plastics, which is why the makers suggest that you only put it on your exposed skin. If you do that, your shoulders and your legs become targets, even if you are dressed in trousers and a shirt.

This is where it becomes a good idea to treat your clothing with insect deterrent. Apparently the military has been using them for years. The active ingredient used is called permethrin and it ought be used at a concentration of 0.5%. There are two ways of applying it: by drenching clothing in it, as the army does or by spraying it on. I imagine that you will be spraying it on.

Do the spraying in the garden far away from any fish pond as permethrin kills fish as well. Spray the clothing and wait for the chemical to soak in and dry out. Clothing treated with insect repellent in this fashion will protect you for about six weeks and will still be active after six washes. However, sunlight breaks permethrin down, so dry the items indoors and store in black plastic bags for longer efficacy.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with indoor mosquito repellent. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Repellent For Dogs.

We all dislike insects getting into the house, do we not? But I do not like flattening the ones that get in either. However, I reside in northern Thailand, 100 yards from thousands of acres of wet rice fields. The farmers spray their fields to decrease the number of insects, but inevitably there are still quite a lot here, especially in the two monsoon seasons.

Therefore, we have had to fortify our house and ourselves against insects, mostly of the flying kind, but not all of which bite by any means. In the monsoon periods of the year, which are approximately May to June and August to September, the main culprit is the mosquito. There is no malaria where I am, but they are still not nice. Coinciding with the mosquitoes are the midges, but they are not nearly so numerous.

When it is not raining, the common house fly is a pest. You just cannot teach a housefly not to sit on you or your food, I have tried it many times. The lessons almost always result in the death of the student by corporal punishment.

On random rainy days squadrons of other kinds of flies will hatch out within hours – you can see masses of them coming out of the ground like bees, but they more resemble lace wings. They are totally harmless, but they get in your hair and everywhere else. Then there are a few types of fly that eat rice or humans if they get in the way, but they seem to favour rice.

The first thing we did was have fly screens fitted into our windows. That helped a lot, but everybody kept leaving the doors open. Then we had screens inserted into the door frames. That really was good for everything except midges and baby mosquitoes that seem to be squirming through the mesh.

We solved that problem by spraying the mesh with permethrin once every couple of months. I am fairly sure that no insects get into our house via that route any more. However, a number of insects were crawling in under the doors, because there were no thresholds or draft-excluders – a draft in Thailand usually being more than welcome. So, I fitted draft-excluders to the doors.

That stopped the scorpions, spiders, millipedes, centipedes and beetles, although some spiders seem to abseil down from the attic into our living quarters. I do not mind spiders so much as long as I cannot see them, because I know that we have a common enemy, to wit flies.

House flies still get in sometimes, especially when visitors and their kids are about. However, the type of spiders we have most of, do not appear to make webs. They stalk their victims and then jump on them; and they are very quick.

In spite of that, we spray the floors and the tops of the walls with permethrin every month or two as well. This stops the ants from entering the house via the attic and mops up any crawling insects that have gotten in via an open door.

Another significant entry point into your home for insects is your pets. You have to take care of your cats and dogs. Groom them regularly, fit a collar which has been impregnated with insecticide, bathe them in insecticidal shampoo and dust them with flea powder.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with indoor mosquito repellent. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Repellent For Dogs.

There are times when it just seems that there are more insects than previously. Perhaps it is the warmer winters and wetter summers helping them breed more easily, or possibly it is because fewer people are using pesticides in their gardens. It is quite understandable that a lot of people do not want to use chemicals on their gardens, but not using anything at all results in a growth in the insect population.

Over the last fifty or so years, people have become more and more used to using chemical insecticides to kill household and garden insect pests because they are a faster and more certain killer. So what do you do if you want to control the number of garden insect pests, but do not want to use chemicals?

Well, you would have to go back to using natural insect pest killers, although most families have forgotten what their great-grandparents used to use to kill insects. The following is a list of a few of the natural ways of killing insect pests. However, not all methods or plants will be available in all countries.

Stinging nettles: if you cut down a bunch of stinging nettles and immerse them in water for a week or more, chemicals will leach out of the vegetation into the water. Strain the water off and spray it over your plants. It will kill or discourage most garden insects. You can also use it as a plant food, but you will have to be careful how strong it is.

Rotenone: is a natural insecticidal. It is made from the roots of the derris plant. It kills by damaging the stomachs of insects. However, it is rather slow-acting and needs to be reapplied frequently in order to obtain the maximum effect.

Washing Up Water: soapy water of any kind will kill aphids or greenfly along with other garden insect pests. This is a very easy control to dispense. Just strain your soapy water into a spray gun (like an empty window spray gun) and squirt your greenfly.

Corn meal: you can dust this around plants or skirting boards to kill insects. If a tomato hornworm or a cockroach eats some, the cornmeal will puff up in the insect’s stomach with the bodily fluids in there and the insect will eventually explode.

Pyrethrum: will paralyze an insect, but it will also wear off, so it is often mixed with a poison to finish the insect off. Otherwise, you can sweep them up.

A combination of cow’s milk, flour and water can be used as a natural insecticide, funnily enough. It is very good at killing the eggs of insects. It also destroys insects themselves by blocking their breathing holes. In other words, they suffocate.

Neem is a very common tree in India and has medicinal as well as insecticidal applications. This natural insecticide repels insects by means of an active ingredient that mimics an insect hormone. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to digest food and it blocks their cycle of reproduction. It works most effectively of all on insects that mainly eat leaves.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on quite a few subjects, but is at present concerned with indoor mosquito repellent. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Repellent For Dogs.

Most people have an exaggerated abhorrence of insects. Especially people who live in towns and cities. People who live in the country are a little more tolerant of them. But why are we like that with insects? Why are we always squashing them and poisoning them? All right, we do not want to share our homes with them, I think that is fair enough, but I also think that we go too far usually.

As an alternative to just killing them on sight, it might be better to try preventing them getting into the house in the first place. A lot of people appear to suppose that all insects are bad, but this is simply not the case. Just imagine how many more flies we would have flying around us and landing on our food, if it were not for spiders, but I do not know anyone who likes spiders. They do not appear to receive much credit for doing a great job. We are on the same side against flies.

But then flies help to quicken the decaying of dead animals as well. Their maggots eat the decomposing flesh of dead animals, which keeps disease and bad smells down. Ants do the same for dead insects and cockroaches do it for scraps of food left lying about. I have not found a good reason for mosquitoes, fleas or ticks yet however.

One thing is for sure, this inbred or learned loathing or fear of insects does not do the manufacturers of insecticides any harm money-wise. Perhaps it is time to take a step back from our paranoia about insects. It is well past time to be more judicious in our killing of insects.

For instance, when you spray your beautiful rose bushes with a chemical insecticide, you want to get rid of greenfly (aphids), but you are also killing the ants, the ladybirds, the spiders and possibly any bees or butterflies that come to feed and pollinate. Whereas, if you had sprayed the bushes with old, filtered washing up water, you would only have killed the greenfly.

Where would we all be if everyone killed all the pollinators? Cropless? In fact, the scarcity of bees is already a global crisis. Although the reason for their fast declining numbers is not quite clear, it cannot help having their immune system or nervous system attacked by the residue of insecticides whenever they take a drink of nectar.

Likewise with butterflies. Gardeners do not like caterpillars, but everyone like butterflies and where would we be without them? In a much duller place, I am sure. Some species of wasps kill thousands of caterpillars. so, it is better to support them rather than kill the caterpillars yourself with a nuclear bomb of a chemical spray.

Some useful natural ways of controlling insects are by the use of washes containing Neem, Tobacco or Pyrethrum. These natural treatments deter them in small doses but will kill if used in a concentrated solution. Look out for products containing them and read the directions carefully to see if they suit your requirements. Borax will help control insect pests that eat their way around your house and so will corn flour.

There are many ways that people can be more discriminating when attacking insects. The main issue is that it is a lot easier to go get a spray, but if you do some research, you will find loads of ways of attacking insects with natural insecticides.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is at present concerned with indoor mosquito repellent. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Repellent For Dogs.