Bugs beware

Sssshhhh. Be very quiet. I'm hunting houseflies.

There, atop the roof of the doghouse on the concrete patio, rests a plate of banana peels covered in beef broth and brown sugar. The sun beats down on this congealing treat as I wait silently for my quarry -- the pesky, buzzing, gross housefly -- to come to a rest and meet his doom.

I'm armed on this unseasonably warm February day with the Bug-A-Salt 2.0, a vicious little weapon that looks like a water gun but shoots a load of table salt capable of killing an unwelcome fly just as soon as he comes in for a landing on what he thinks will be a scrumptious snack.

Quietly, we wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

BB GUNS AND SAND

The Bug-A-Salt is the brainchild of junior high school dropout, surfer, artist and inventor Lorenzo Maggiore.

"When I was a kid, I'd put sand down the barrel of a BB gun and shoot flies off our picture window," says Maggiore, who grew up in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was speaking by telephone while riding his Orbea road bike to the offices of Skell Inc., the Santa Monica, Calif., company he founded in 2009 while developing the Bug-A-Salt.

The laid-back Maggiore, who says he spent most of his teens as a surf bum, was 19 when he started a wallpaper-hanging business, but still carried around the thought that there was something to that whole thing of shooting flies with sand and a BB gun.

Years later, when he had a little money and after several homemade iterations, a proper prototype was made. Maggiore eventually connected with a toymaker in China, and, after an Indiegogo crowd-sourcing fundraiser raised $577,000, the Bug-A-Salt came to be in 2012. The company has sold about 700,000 of the salt-shooters, Maggiore says.

"I'm surprised no one had ever thought of the product before," he says. "It's more of an enjoyment and revenge type of thing against the fly. It's really fun. I've always looked at it as an art piece. It's kinda ridiculous, but it really works."

It's an inspired design. Load the gun with table salt, pump it like you would your shotgun, click the safety off, and you are ready to unleash a load of salty death. It's got a range of about 3 feet, Maggiore says, holds about 80 shots, and kills bugs without toxic spray.

The sand was replaced with salt for a couple of reasons. Sand

and moving plastic and rubber parts get along about as well as water and gasoline. Also, a blast of sand taken at a fly on a hot dog might kill the fly but ruins the hot dog. Another bonus is that instead of smashing a fly and getting squished viscera all over the place, the salt from the Bug-A-Salt leaves the creatures stone dead but intact.

"It just made perfect sense," Maggiore says.

The Bug-A-Salt 2.0 comes in yellow and black, yellow and green and camo, and costs $39.95 at bugasalt.com. There are also Bug-A-Salt-branded grilling aprons, bottle openers, T-shirts and containers of maggots that turn into flies or, in Bug-A-Salt terminology, "targets" available.

"I pity the fly," is one of the phrases used in its marketing, and a video at bugasalt.com features avowed fly-hater Maggiore, sporting wraparound shades and a visor flipped backward, laying waste to flies in a short how-to tutorial.

"I've been weird about flies since I was a little kid," he says with a bewildered laugh. "I used to put them in my Hot Wheels and send them down the track on fire. I was a maniac. They bugged me. Maybe because we had that giant picture window and they were always buzzing around."

I could use that picture window about now because, despite weather that would be perfect for a picnic, no flies are buzzing around my patio trap.

KINDER AND GENTLER

The Bug-A-Salt is just one of several products putting a whimsical twist on wiping out flying and crawling pests. There are various electric flyswatters that zap buzzy nuisances with a deadly jolt; something called a Flyshooter that launches a round plastic disc to kill flies and other pests; and then there's the BugZooka.

Despite its name, which conjures nothing short of loud, fiery, bug murder, it is actually a less violent way of getting rid of uninvited insect guests.

The BugZooka, which sells for $24.95 at bugzooka.com, is a tube with a rubber bellows at one end that sucks bugs through removable trap doors at the other end and seals them inside a removable tip. Compress the bellows, aim the tip toward whatever icky thing is scooting across your floor, wall or ceiling, push the red trigger button and THWOP!, the creepy crawly is now trapped, ready to be released back into the wild -- and away from your living room -- or left to shrivel and die a slow death in the clear plastic tip. You can also detach and stick the end in the freezer for an hour or so and then clean the frozen bugs out of the tube.

Really. That's an option, according to the instructions.

Perhaps the best part of using the BugZooka is that TWHOP! When mine was delivered and I got it pieced together -- easy peasy, by the way -- that sudden sound after pressing the button and the release of the bellows and protective bumper is about as much fun as seeing a bewildered spider thrashing about after being sucked into the catch tube.

The BugZooka, like the Bug-A-Salt, is nontoxic and uses no batteries. Both are fun to use and are guaranteed conversation starters. With the BugZooka, though, there's no need to wipe salt off the kitchen counter or dining room floor, and the mayhem factor is much lower.

The BugZooka is also a fun, if wildly inefficient, way to clean debris off hardwood floors. While searching dark corners for spiders at my house I ended up trapping mostly dust bunnies, a few dried carcasses of tiny centipedes and small clumps of dirt. I also found a dead moth hanging in a spider web outside above the sliding glass door for my BugZooka to inhale.

SKUNKED

Back on the patio, that banana peel, brown sugar and beef broth bait has failed to attract any flies.

The same is true for the Rescue brand Disposable Fly Trap, another nontoxic fly slayer that I've hung by a string outside by the garbage can and recycling container.

The trap -- available at Home Depot, Wal-Mart and other retailers -- is a clear plastic bag with bait that is set off when filled with water, and is meant for hanging around areas that flies love, luring them to their deaths inside the bag. (Do not, by the way, spill any of this after you've added the water. It smells like a used spittoon inside a Dumpster in August, which, of course, is why flies love it. It's foul enough to bring a man to his knees. Yes, I'm speaking from experience.) A single bag can trap up to 20,000 flies, according to rescue.com. Mine caught exactly zero.

Though the recent afternoons had been warm, the evenings were still too cool and the fly population simply hadn't started buzzing yet. It is still winter, after all.

Tired of waiting for fly action on the patio, I took my Bug-A-Salt and roamed around outside, making my way to the front yard and carport.

There, sitting still on the wall, is a spider. I pump the gun, quietly approach to within a foot or two, aim and ...

Dangit. Safety was on.

I click the safety off, aim again, think for a second and then shoot a harmless blast of salt onto the concrete carport floor.

Take it easy, little spider. I'll save my killing for the flies.

HomeStyle on 03/04/2017