Blacklighting Insects UV Lights Collecting

Questions for viewers:
1. What is a memorable insect you've seen at your porch light?
2. Have you ever set up lights to attract insects?
3. Would you like to see a video about "how to" make a blacklight set up?

Here is some of the blacklighting footage we took in Arizona this past summer on the road to Gardner Canyon. Many insects are attracted to lights at night including lepidoptera like moths, beetles, antlions and many other bugs. If you like entomology you will find that you can actually see more insects at night than during the day in pretty much any single location. Most people are familiar with seeing them at their porch lights in the summer months, or flying outside a window in the home to a lamp they can't quite seem to reach. A few of the popular urban insects are moths, green lacewings and crane flies. Mantises and spiders will often come towards lights because, like human bug collectors, they know their quarry will be there.
I run a mercury vapor lamp on a tripod. A generator powers all the lights and is the source of the buzzing noise through much of the video. Many older street lights used to be mercury vapor but they were phased out in the US markets partly because they aren't as energy efficient as modern lights. When found they are expensive. And then I also run a couple blacklight fluorescent tubes. Not the black ultraviolet ones that people use to light up posters but full spectrum UV bulbs ones that emit light in the range of 365 nanometers. These are not difficult to find.

Thanks always to my friends, Jesse Greene, John Skierski and Jesse Ray for making these trips so fun and interesting!

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