While you may not want bats in your attic they are essential to keeping the mosquito population down in your yard. Bats are more helpful to people than harmful. Throughout the world, bats are responsible for insect control, dispersing seeds in the rainforest, the pollination of tropical plants, and their guano makes a great fertilizer no matter which part of the world you are in.

In the western world, bats are essential for insect control. Most areas have several species of bats, but the most common are the big brown bat and the little brown bat. Bats are the top predator of many night-flying insects, including beetles, moths, and mosquitoes. Encouraging bats to populate an area can reduce, and even eliminate, the need to use chemicals for insect control.

Bats normally eat about half their weight in flying insects each night and a bat still nursing its young can eat even more. One small brown bat can eat 600 insects in an hour. Having a colony of bats nearby can protect gardens and crops from major damage by pest species such as cucumber beetles, moths, cutworm, corn earworm, leafhoppers, and junebugs.

To encourage bats to eliminate insect pests from your garden you can place a bat house in your backyard. Bats look for new homes in late spring, so it is best to put one up in the late winter as the season starts to change. By putting two, or more, bat houses up facing different directions you can increase the chances of bats coming to live in your garden.

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