Living in the woods comes with a plague of black flies and mosquitos. If they are too thick, they can make your summer season a living hell, especially when you are fully dependent on growing and hunting your foods.

One solution that may work is the electrical zapper (it worked for me), the smaller models using less than 100 watts. If you have solar panels in the trib, you might have enough power to use a zapper or two, especially as mosquito season is also the time that the sun is high, powerful, and abundant. I tried experimenting with one, and found that only a fraction of the bugs electrified by the units were mosquitos. It did many moths, beetles, and virtually anything that flies about at night...that might also be feeding on your garden plants.

But I was shocked to find this past summer, as I was staying in my trailer in a mosquito-infested region, that few mosquitos would land on the windows when the lights were on inside. My heart just sank, indicating that the zappers might not work as well as I thought. I removed the "fur" from the zapper one morning to check what sort of bugs had been attracted (bugs accumulate on the electrifying grid like a fur). To my amazement, there were few large mosquitos, but plenty of young ones, though I could not always make out what the young flies were. Some were not mosquitos, and others looked like them though maybe not.

Zappers have an ultra-violet fluorescent bulb, unlike the lights in the trailer. The immediate problem is that the zapper's bulb does it's job well: it attracts bugs. Yes, attraction is a problem because, at first, you're going to have more bugs near your home than you would otherwise. You'll be hoping for a pay-off in the longer term, and perhaps the bulb will attract the bugs away from the garden before they know there's food there.

It's a roulette table if ever I saw one. Some say the zappers just don't work, for mosquitos, anyway. What I think I have resolved correctly is that many mosquitos come near the light, but don't go for it. They might hang around on a blade of grass, a tree trunk, maybe even the electrical cord of the unit. That gave me an idea: the fogging chemical that I haven't yet tried. I've seen the package, and the person applying the spray isn't wearing a mask. I like that very much. But does this chemical kill mosquitos?

Well when I was out buying another zapper once, I met someone in the mosquito-war isle of the department store, and he just happened to be purchasing some of the fogging chemical. He said that it needs to be applied repeatedly. After this I learned that it's great for a yard party, as it's safe for the kids, but won't last long after the party. For a large tract of land as I hope to have in the tribulation, this was not good news at all...accept for one thing: what if one used the fogging chemical just for a 20-foot radius around an electrical zapper? Einstein, eat your heart out.

Zappers come in larger models that can attract for long distances, and I figure that 99 percent of the attracted bugs will come to within a 20-foot radius of the bulb. Spraying a 40-foot circle every couple of weeks is do-able, very do-able. I haven't experimented yet, but thought I'd pass this brilliant, electrifying idea onto you anyway.

When I had a place in the sunny south, the house was painted off-white. Bugs of all varieties were attracted to those white walls. Many would just stay in one spot for hours, as if staring at the flood lights near the roof. Others were flying about constantly. The light would shine on the flying bugs in such a bright way that you could see their flight patterns; they all gave a spectacular show that I had never seen before.

At the time I had four chickens and two ducks with clipped wings. They would feast on those bugs all night long. They would pick them off the wall as they could see them well. So, paint the walls of your chicken coop a light color, and leave a light bulb on for a few hours whenever you think it best to feed them "meat."

I have no idea what bug dinners each night might do to your eggs, so perhaps you should check with a chicken expert if you decide to do this dastardly thing. Bugs for dinner could increase the nitrogen content of the chicken droppings -- a good thing for the garden soil -- and every bug in your chicken's stomach is one less bug that might land on your garden plants.

Unfortunately, chickens like the big juicy bugs, not skinny mosquitos (you should have seen those hens turn into wolves whenever a large moth flew into view). But I haven't gotten to my point yet. What if you use a bug zapper near a light-colored wall or shed, and spray the shed with mosquito killer? What if you have a tank filled with carbon dioxide inside the shed, slowly releasing the harmless chemical that mosquitos are attracted to? Let the carbon dioxide escape through a window screen or two, and fog the window screens, for that is surely where the mosquitos should accumulate.

At my place down south, I thought to attract the bugs from as far around as possible by the flood lights. Then, after turning all lights out at bedtime, I would leave the zapper on all night. You get it, right? Attract them to the general vicinity of the zapper with the larger lights on the roof; then attract them to the vicinity of the light-painted shed after bedtime with the zapper; then attract the mosquitos to the window screens with carbon dioxide. If you leave a light on in the shed, you'll have many types of bugs on the screen as well.

There is the question of whether it's a good or bad thing to kill bugs large-scale indiscriminately. I figure that when a garden is as important as it will be in the trib, the place would be better off wholly bugless.

Problem is, daytime insects sleep while the murder of night-time bugs goes on. And daytime insects also like garden plants...but won't come to the zapper because it's not attractive enough by day. But this chapter is about flies that bite the skin. Black flies. Daytime pests. How to kill them before they kill you? If ever you fall unconscious outdoors in black-fly season, they will drink your blood dry if you're there long enough.

I sat on my lawn chair one mid-day when black flies and mosquitos were thick. I was armed defensively with a mosquito-net shirt (covering all my head as well). I had to tuck the mosquito-net shirt into my pants to keep black flies out, as they find any hole possible. I wore a long sleeve t-shirt because mosquitos could sometimes reach through the net material to my arms. They would often get through the net and t-shirt on the top of the shoulders where the net material was close to the skin. Offensively, I had a fly swatter, a grin, and some soft-cottony white mittens.

Yes, I wore gloves to work in the summer lest my hands be sucked dry of blood. But on this day the mittens turned into an offensive weapon. Black flies were all over my pants, and I learned that if one drops a finger on them at just the right speed, without alarming them, they would just stay put, or continue walking along, as the finger squashed-rolled them to death. I couldn't believe it. Seven times out of ten, the black flies just let me press them to death, though I would tend to roll them a bit on the jean material to make death more certain. At first, I could do one fly just about every second. They were also on the mittens, looking for a hole large enough to reach the skin, and I would just press them there too.

After about an hour, I had eliminated most of the black flies, and many dozen mosquitos. The latter would not let me get my finger close before flying away, so it was the lightning-quick swatter for them. My jeans were a massacre zone, covered with the blood of war. These pests were making my life hell as I worked outdoors every day.

I figured that the flies on me at that time were all the flies that existed in a larger circle around me, for as far as they could see my movements. I wondered what the war would have been like if ten people were working around the house...and that's when I realized a very good thing. With ten people killing flies every day, flies would quickly thin out after a couple of weeks. Every fly killed today is one or more generations that will not live tomorrow. Who knows how many generations any particular fly will be responsible for? If the fly population is reduced drastically in one year, the next year will be much better.

Some flies, and I think mosquitos fit this category, are local i.e. they don't fly far. Ever notice how young mosquitos just swarm in circles at one spot? They tend not to fly about on windy days, and they live in the lower parts of the landscape, in the grass.

So, here's my plan for the trib. I'm going to take every person I've got, and arm them early in the fly season with mittens, a fly swatter, and a lawn chair. I'm going to separate them by a hundred feet all around the house. They will be instructed to walk about their part of the forest slowly, to attract as many flies as possible, and at the peek time to sit down in their lawn chairs for merciless battle. If this is done for a couple of hours each day for a few days, I think the situation will become enormously improved for the entire season, with benefits into the coming years. The war can be repeated once every three weeks.

There are people who work on assembly lines, doing thousands of the same operations day in and day out, for years. By comparison, two hours a day for a few days each three weeks is a cake walk. If each of ten persons kills 500 black flies on the first day in a 200-foot diameter around the house, the next day will see 5,000 less, and the next generation will see many times more than 5,000 never born.

Some readers will think I'm crazy because in their neck of the woods, flies are not bad. They don't realize that in my neck of the woods, where land is wet all over the place, and where lakes and rivers abound, the flies are tremendous and need to be reduced.

I was walking along last year on this property I now live on, when in a small stream I saw blackish larvae floating about in clods. I thought they were mosquitos until I read an article telling that black flies can only be born in flowing water (unlike mosquitos requiring still waters). The article said that black fly eggs become attached to rocks or other things in the stream. If this can be verified, lets try to clear our stream(s) of rocks and branches.

After I had fought my lawn-chair battle that day, I found another method that was very promising. I would walk slowly to a tent, then enter it slowly, so that hovering black flies and mosquitos would follow me in. Then I'd wave my hands and make chaos with the tent door mainly closed. As the bugs were in a frenzy, I stepped out the door and left most of them inside to dehydrate. On hot days, black flies were dead in a few hours, otherwise, on cooler days, they'd make it to the next day but no more.

Mosquitos were different. One day I closed a window so as to trap a half dozen mosquitos between the glass and the screen. I did the experiment. It did not rain for the next six days, but all the mosquitos in that trap, so skinny to begin with, without food or water lived into the sixth day. I was amazed and realized why dry climate doesn't seem to destroy their populations; as soon as it rains, out they come from under the underbrush. Black flies, however, are dead and gone as soon as the summer heat arrives, if there is normal or little precipitation.

At times, black flies would be in the trailer in the evening after dark, even though they are a daytime fly. I figured that they came in just before dark, at twilight. They liked to fly around the light bulbs. So, here's a thought for your experimentation: have a light in a tent at dusk, with the door open, and see if black flies stream inside to the bulb. If so, close the tent after black flies no longer stream in, and let them die there.