What is Pest Control Tactics?

Pest control tactics were mentioned occasionally in writings of the ancient Chinese, Sumerian, and Egyptian scholars. Many of these tactics were embedded in religion or superstition, but a few had real scientific merit. Predatory ants, for example, were used in China as early as 1200 B.C. to protect citrus groves from caterpillars and wood boring beetles. Ropes or bamboo sticks tied between adjacent branches helped the ants move easily from place to place. A passage in Homer's Iliad (8th century B.C.) describes the use of fire to drive locusts into the sea, and the ancient Egyptians organized long lines of human drovers to repel swarms of invading locusts. Pythagorus, a Greek philosopher and mathematician, was credited with clearing malaria from a Sicilian town during the 6th century B.C. by instructing its residents to drain the marshes. Chemical substances that purportedly killed or repelled insects were in common usage. Many of these were of questionable value, but some worked, and a few are still in use today. Some of the inorganic compounds, such as sulfur and arsenic, have well-established insecticidal activity. And modern science has only recently come to recognize that many plant extracts used by ancient apothecaries (e.g, lemon oil, wormwood, hellebore, fleabane, etc.) do indeed contain compounds with useful activity against insects.