'Stupid' June bugs flock to P.E.I. man's makeshift death trap

Every night for the past week a contraption in the backyard of a Central Bedeque man's home has been grabbing the attention of his neighbours and a whole bunch of June bugs.

Ron Rayner said a lot of people driving by his house, especially at night, wondered what he had in his yard.

A couple of powerful lights lure the June bugs to Rayner's makeshift trap — a plastic drum turned into a soapy swimming pool with a bug zapper at the back

"They're stupid. Same as flying at your screen door. They just fly till they run into something," said Rayner.

"They fly into the contraption, hit the back and then as soon as they hit something, they fall and go into the soapy water."

In just a week, he has taken down more than 1,000 June bugs, one night even capturing more than 400 bugs in just under an hour.

A bug zapper at the back of the trap kills mosquitoes that are attracted to the water after it's been stagnating with the carcasses of dead June bugs for a few days.

It's not the adult June bugs that really bother Rayner. It's their eggs that bury in the grass and, as larvae, eat away at his green lawn.

"If I can eradicate two, three, or four thousand June bugs, half of them are female and each lays a thousand eggs, that's a million eggs that I don't want laid on my front lawn."

He says last year his lawn had a few larvae-infested spots, and some of his neighbours lawns were badly affected.

"Some even had to Rottotiller part of their lawn to get the damage," he said.

Rayner's neighbour Blair Conway says the problem has been around for three to five years.

"It was going through the whole community basically."

Conway is keeping an eye on Rayner's experiment and if his lawn suffers this fall says he will consider putting one up on his side of the road.

Rayner says he'll really know how effective the trap is this fall when the damaged patches of grass usually emerge.