How To Keep June Bugs Away From Lights – Porch and Exterior Lights

If you are noticing an abundance of medium-sized beetles in Late-Spring and Summer, you probably have June Bugs! June Bugs are named after their sudden appearance in May or June, and are extremely common throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico!

Although these beetles are generally harmless, they can be quite annoying because they are attracted to lights which means at night they’ll be pinging off your porch lights and any other exterior lights you might have around your home. In this article we’ll be talking about how to keep june bugs away from lights and how to deter them from visiting your home!

How To Keep June Bugs Away From Lights:

Keeping june bugs away from your porch or exterior lights can be a difficult task, but definitely not impossible. You’ll just have to follow some of these guidelines, and pretty soon the sound of june bugs bumping into your lights will be a thing of the past!

how to keep june bugs away from lights

Keep Your Porch As Clean As Possible

Although June Bugs typically live in the grass, soil, bushes and generally just in your lawn, if you have a dirty porch it will attract additional june bugs to your porch! This means cleaning up dirt, leaves, food scraps, or anything else which might be food sources for june bugs and or objects they can use as places to hide.

Another thing you need to look out for is standing water on your porch. If your porch doesn’t drain, standing water creates a place for bugs to breed and gather for water. So make sure you don’t have standing water on your porch!

Spray A Perimeter Pest Treatment:

Along with keeping your porch perimeter clean, you’ll also need to put down a perimeter pest treatment. Just keeping your porch clean isn’t enough to fully combat june bugs from being attracted to your lights, so you’ll need to have a perimeter pest treatment to kill some of the june bugs as well.

For most homes I’d recommend the Ortho Home Defense Perimeter Treatment! This treatment is extremely easy to put down and overall it does a good job at stopping and reducing most june bug infestations. If you tend to have a lot of june bugs, it might not be strong enough, but in my experience for most homes this is perfect.

Change Your Light Bulbs

Although many people ask if june bugs are blind, they are attracted to lights because they use lights for navigation. But not all light bulbs are built the same according to june bugs and other insects.

June bugs can only see lights within 650 and 300 nanometers, so if you get warmer lights that are outside this range, june bugs won’t be able to see them, and will be less likely to be attracted to your lights!

We recommend using Yellow or Orange LED lights for june bugs because these are past their visible spectrum and they will likely just ignore this spectrum of light.

Final Thoughts On June Bugs And Your Exterior Lights

It can be quite annoying on a beautiful summer night to just hear the clanking of june bugs bouncing off your exterior lights, and it can be quite unisghtly. Although june bugs can be hard to control during the summer months, if you follow the above steps you’ll definitely see a reduction in june bugs around your property! You can also take a look at our guide on where june bugs come from!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide on how to keep june bugs away from your lights, and hopefully it brings you some peace and quiet!

Resources:

https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/mayjune-beetles/

About The Author:

David Floyd has 20 years of experience working as a pest control technician as well as running his own pest control company. His main goal is to provide accurate and helpful DIY tips to keep your home pest-free and how to identify different types of household pests!