Insects don't swarm at LED lights

I have LED headlights and an LED light bar on my tractor and I can say with 100% confidence that bugs swarm both. To the point I have to wear glasses to keep them out of my eyes if I’m on it for more than about 30 seconds at night.

I’m guessing he’s confusing the dramatic drop in insect life overall with a change in behavior due to different lights.

Welp, they do for mine. I've had to stop turning on outdoor LEDs because angry bees kept showing up, and there'd be 3-10 dead ones on my doorstep every morning. These are white bulbs. Might be "zombees."

Also, not sure about white bulbs, but those color-configurable spotlights definitely emit UV at least when set to anything near blue/purple. They cause certain things to glow. Probably white is doing it too but it's harder to see.

My pet theory is that the dimmable LEDs repel insects (when used as a grow light).

The thing that insects can see and we don't is the rapid flashing of a PWM power controller.

I wonder if these streetlights have power saving fade-ins as the nightfall approaches instead of clicking on at sunset.

Like - https://doi.org/10.1109/CSNT51715.2021.9509652

I love to shoot long exposure timelapse of the night sky. I set up a couple of LEDs dimmed as low as possible to light a bit of the foreground (over the course of the long exposure the low light adds up so it looks normal for those not familiar). Out of sheer laziness, I just placed them on either side of my tripod. The next day after processing the shot, it was pretty much ruined because of all of the bugs showing up as tracers in each frame.

So, no, not my experience at all.

I really don’t think UV is playing much of a role here. You could also sort their chart by power usage, or IR produced. The paper conclusion paragraph even states UV and IR as candidates but the article just says UV.

The entire premise (moon uv, ir etc) is wrong so the conclusion is wrong.

Sky is always brighter than the land, moon is not required.

Lamp movement is the confusion of where is “up”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3

Yes, you need some ultraviolet to attract insects. That's why bug-zappers have near UV lamps. They're usually compact fluorescent bulbs. Some ads say 365nm is the right color.

Weird. My home has only LED bulbs. There are still moths and bees who get attracted to the light when I leave the window open.

I wonder how much of it is also the LED flicker. If I was a small bug and moving quickly with a high visual refresh rate, I would probably hate the experience of the LED flicker

I made a huge LED display using lifx tiles (which are no longer sold). 5x5 tiles in a square, so I could hack video rendering and images to the lights. Each tile had 64 LED bulbs which could be independently controlled, both in brightness and colour.

When I did this I was in the countryside and I can state without hesitation that the insects loved it and flocked to it and while I found it cute, it was annoying because they would occasionally get trapped in the small gaps between the tiles and get stuck.

I'm therefore 100% convinced that insects just love fancy lighting setups.

The study didn't cover high pressure sodium bulbs, the previously popular type in street lamps.

The outside LED lights on my RV would disagree with this.

Wow. I put spotlight on a sheet in the garden to figure out what moths we have. Got nothing, and maybe this is why.

I wonder if it’s only the UV that makes a difference. I have some Yuji SunWave bulbs (and the NIR versions). Would be interesting to test those at night against normal LED bulbs and incandescent.

This is utter nonsense. I live in an RV all summer. Every light is LED, inside and out. They swarm all over the lights.

Maybe this helps answer the question of 'where did the bugs go', because windshields aren't as full of them today compared to 20-30 years ago.

I have noticed that. We have LED porch lights, and never see the usual moths and whatnot.

Why can't LED lights have the same warm yellow tone? These pure white street lights are much worse than than the old style warm ones.

In coastal Florida we require to use turtle-safe light fixtures, mine are 585nm and they didn't attract insects too except potato bugs

Um, no. I live on a farm and often have to do chores in the dark with an LED headlight. Sometimes I have to turn it off because I'm dive bombed by so many insects.

because they dont emit UV.... a lot of waffle to tell me that

Do flames emit UV?

What lies.

I bought LED "bug lights" — those yellow bulbs that are supposed to be invisible to bugs.

Every bulb in the pack electrically failed within 10 minutes.

I gave up and went back to an incandescent. Still works perfectly.

So sick of the zero-quality LED bulbs that have entirely flooded the market. Of course they had their hand forced by government mandates, people needed mass quantities of cheap bulbs that could match a 75¢ incandescent. They didn't have this problem when LED bulbs were $20 each (and weighed about as much, due to the heat sink).