Flies and UV-A light equipment
Technical note on flies and UV-A light equipment, with a focus on diagnosis, prevention and criteria applicable to professional pest management.
Flying insects, in addition to being a nuisance, can be a major threat to health. Any insect that manages to access a dining room, food preparation place or a hospital room can become highly contaminating. Let's talk especially about flies. Flies lick, bite and even suck through their proboscis. They feed on blood, carrion, garbage, fruit and decomposing organic material, which makes them great transmitters of pathogens. The average fly can carry up to 1.9 million bacteria on its body, rendering food unfit for consumption once it has come into contact with it.
How can we capture them to take care of the health of our spaces? There are two types of flying insect traps: active and passive. The active ones are those that attract or make the insect fall through baiting, special mechanisms, UV-A light and other resources. Unlike these, passive traps are those where insects fall simply by getting in their way.
UV-A light kits fall into the category of active traps, as they attract flying insects through UV-A radiation. The UV-A light spectrum that is between 350 and 400 nanometers is the one of maximum attraction and at the same time it is a range of UV radiation that does not present any harm or risk to humans or any other complex organism. This light is imperceptible to the human eye, but it is of great benefit to flies and other flying insects as it helps them orient themselves.
Once the insects are attracted to the light, most of them remain attached to the adhesive sheets of said equipment. This occurs because the eyes of flies are made up of hundreds of facets and individual lenses that allow them to detect the polarization of light and light spectrums that we cannot identify.
An efficient piece of equipment to capture flies is the Bugster 60, manufactured by the leading company in Latin America AROD. Its four Philips Actinic Secura lamps make this equipment one of the most powerful on the market for capturing flying insects. With high specification materials, such as aluminum, it becomes ultralight, durable, easy to clean and aesthetic equipment.
Its practical and elegant design makes it adaptable to any space without affecting the image of the establishment or home, ensuring that the reputation of the business or industry will be maintained with the highest safety standards.
The importance of being a capture team and not an extermination team is that the flying insects will stay in the trap and organic contamination will not be generated, which is a very important factor in food handling and trading establishments, since it could put our health and that of our customers at risk.
With international certifications that endorse the brand as a quality manufacturer with global reach, the proposal is to work together with the food industry to ensure customer safety.