On January 6th I posted about a small insect which was triggering the touch dimmer I'd installed in a metal bodied table lamp.
I was puzzled because I didn't think an object as small as that bug would have enough body capacitance to be sensed by the touch dimmer when it landed on the metal lamp.
Tonight I found out the reason. The lamp started turning off and back on again and I looked inside and found a Box Elder beetle crawling around the very upper edge of the bulb socket. When it simultaneously stepped on the socket shell and the slightly projecting upper edge of the bulb's screw base the touch dimmer would switch.
The bug's legs and body were creating a resistive path between the metal lamp body and the unswitched side of the line voltage, causing the touch dimmmer to do its thing.
Mystery solved!
Jeff
--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
The speed of light is 1.8*10e12 furlongs per fortnight.
(Actually, these are not beetles - but "true bugs", order hemiptera, notably including stink bugs.)
About 25 years ago, I was working part-time at my father's electronics business. A very nearby box elder tree experienced a bumper crop year of box elder bugs. That October, they had a spectacular mating season - being 3-4 inches apart on the exterior of the building. At times, copulating couples could be seen within 12 inches of each other there.
One of my coworkers called them "f***ing bugs". Dozens of them made it indoors one way or another, mostly through window gaps that they could find and squeeze through.
I have some memory of one of them landing on the solder in the solder pot of the wave soldering machine - while the solder was molten. Obviously suicidal to do...
Yes, we have a few Box Elder bugs in our home over every winter. And when it starts to cool off in the fall the sunlit (and thus warm) outside walls of our home are teeming with what looks like hundreds of them. I never studied them enough to see if they were fornicating, I'll take your word for that, Don.
Now that I've finally satisfied my curiosity about how those bugs are triggering the touch dimmer in the lamp, I can probably live with an occasional hit, they only occur once a week or so. If it finally "bugs me" too much I'll just turn up a TFE insulating ring to cover the upper edge of the bulb's screw base and end the problem.
On the other hand, now I remember a box elder borer, which is a beetle. I'm not so sure now I was talking about the same insect that you were.
Box elder bugs (in adult form) look like a "hybrid" between lightning bugs and roaches, plus some pinkish orange coloration on their wings. They are about the size of most lightning bugs.
The Six-Legged Meat of the Future Wall Street Journal February 19, 2011
By MARCEL DICKE and ARNOLD VAN HUIS
At the London restaurant Archipelago, diners can order the $11 Baby Bee Brulee: a creamy custard topped with a crunchy little bee. In New York, the Mexican restaurant Toloache offers $11 chapulines tacos: two tacos stuffed with Oaxacan-style dried grasshoppers.
Could beetles, dragonfly larvae and water bug caviar be the meat of the future? As the global population booms and demand strains the world's supply of meat, there's a growing need for alternate animal proteins. Insects are high in protein, B vitamins and minerals like iron and zinc, and they're low in fat. Insects are easier to raise than livestock, and they produce less waste. Insects are abundant. Of all the known animal species, 80% walk on six legs; over 1,000 edible species have been identified. And the taste? It's often described as "nutty."
The vast majority of the developing world already eats insects. In Laos and Thailand, weaver-ant pupae are a highly prized and nutritious delicacy. They are prepared with shallots, lettuce, chilies, lime and spices and served with sticky rice. Further back in history, the ancient Romans considered beetle larvae to be gourmet fare, and the Old Testament mentions eating crickets and grasshoppers. In the 20th century, the Japanese emperor Hirohito's favorite meal was a mixture of cooked rice, canned wasps (including larvae, pupae and adults), soy sauce and sugar.
Will Westerners ever take to insects as food? It's possible. We are entomologists at Wageningen University, and we started promoting insects as food in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Many people laughed=97 and cringed=97at first, but interest gradually became more serious. In
2006 we created a "Wageningen=97City of Insects" science festival to promote the idea of eating bugs; it attracted more than 20,000 visitors.
Over the past two years, three Dutch insect-raising companies, which normally produce feed for animals in zoos, have set up special production lines to raise locusts and mealworms for human consumption. Now those insects are sold, freeze-dried, in two dozen retail food outlets that cater to restaurants. A few restaurants in the Netherlands have already placed insects on the menu, with locusts and mealworms (beetle larvae) usually among the dishes.
Insects have a reputation for being dirty and carrying diseases=97yet less than 0.5% of all known insect species are harmful to people, farm animals or crop plants. When raised under hygienic conditions=97eating bugs straight out of the backyard generally isn't recommended=97many insects are perfectly safe to eat.
Meanwhile, our food needs are on the rise. The human population is expected to grow from six billion in 2000 to nine billion in 2050. Meat production is expected to double in the same period, as demand grows from rising wealth. Pastures and fodder already use up 70% of all agricultural land, so increasing livestock production would require expanding agricultural acreage at the expense of rain forests and other natural lands. Officials at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently predicted that beef could become an extreme luxury item by 2050, like caviar, due to rising production costs.
Raising insects for food would avoid many of the problems associated with livestock. For instance, swine and humans are similar enough that they can share many diseases. Such co-infection can yield new disease strains that are lethal to humans, as happened during a swine fever outbreak in the Netherlands in the late 1990s. Because insects are so different from us, such risks are accordingly lower.
Insects are also cold-blooded, so they don't need as much feed as animals like pigs and cows, which consume more energy to maintain their body temperatures. Ten pounds of feed yields one pound of beef, three pounds of pork, five pounds of chicken and up to six pounds of insect meat.
Insects produce less waste, too. The proportion of livestock that is not edible after processing is 30% for pork, 35% for chicken, 45% for beef and 65% for lamb. By contrast, only 20% of a cricket is inedible.
Worms, crickets, dung beetles -- to most people they're just creepy crawlers. To Brooklyn painter and art professor Marc Dennis, they're yummy ingredients for his Bug Dinners.
Raising insects requires relatively little water, especially as compared to the production of conventional meat (it takes more than 10 gallons of water, for instance, to produce about two pounds of beef). Insects also produce far less ammonia and other greenhouse gases per pound of body weight. Livestock is responsible for at least 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Raising insects is more humane as well. Housing cattle, swine or chicken in high densities causes stress to the animals, but insects like mealworms and locusts naturally like to live in dense quarters. The insects can be crowded into vertical stacked trays or cages. Nor do bug farms have to be restricted to rural areas; they could sprout up anywhere, from a suburban strip mall to an apartment building. Enterprising gourmets could even keep a few trays of mealworms in the garage to ensure a fresh supply.
The first insect fare is likely to be incorporated subtly into dishes, as a replacement for meat in meatballs and sauces. It also can be mixed into prepared foods to boost their nutritional value=97like putting mealworm paste into a quiche. And dry-roasted insects can be used as a replacement for nuts in baked goods like cookies and breads.
.We continue to make progress in the Netherlands, where the ministry of agriculture is funding a new $1.3 million research program to develop ways to raise edible insects on food waste, such as brewers' grain (a byproduct of beer brewing), soyhulls (the skin of the soybean) and apple pomace (the pulpy remains after the juice has been pressed out). Other research is focusing on how protein could be extracted from insects and used in processed foods.
Though it is true that intentionally eating insects is common only in developing countries, everyone already eats some amount of insects. The average person consumes about a pound of insects per year, mostly mixed into other foods. In the U.S., most processed foods contain small amounts of insects, within limits set by the Food and Drug Administration. For chocolate, the FDA limit is 60 insect fragments per 100 grams. Peanut butter can have up to 30 insect parts per 100 grams, and fruit juice can have five fruit-fly eggs and one or two larvae per 250 milliliters (just over a cup). We also use many insect products to dye our foods, such as the red dye cochineal in imitation crab sticks, Campari and candies. So we're already some of the way there in making six-legged creatures a regular part of our diet.
Not long ago, foods like kiwis and sushi weren't widely known or available. It is quite likely that in 2020 we will look back in surprise at the era when our menus didn't include locusts, beetle larvae, dragonfly larvae, crickets and other insect delights.
=97Mr. Dicke and Mr. Van Huis are professors of entomology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Recipe: Crispy Crickets
Preheat the oven to 225 degrees. Strip the antennae, limbs and wings (if any) from 20 to 30 clean, frozen adult crickets, or 40 to 60 cricket nymphs. Spread the stripped crickets on a lightly oiled baking sheet and place in oven. Bake until crickets are crisp, around 20 minutes. Yield: one cup.
Sprinkle these on salads or put them through a coffee grinder to turn them into bug "flour." You could even combine the crickets with Chex Mix for a protein-rich snack.
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