Hydrosphere "At least the bee zapper was working. For years their hives had been under siege by africanised swarms.
[...]
...a few weeks ago, Clair had discovered a net reference by a fellow in Egypt, who'd discovered that the african variety beat their wimgs faster than the tame european variety. Burrowing into archaic twencen military technology, he had adapted a sensor-scanner designs from an old defunct project called 'Star Wars'.
[...]
Like a glittering scarecrow, the cruciform laser system watched over her squat hives. When she had first turned it on, the surrounding fields had come startlingly alight with hundreds of tiny , flaming embers. The next morning, ash smudges were all that were left of the vicious invaders... but her own honeybees were untouched."
Confirmed
Astonishingly, someone has just tested such a system , on mosquitoes!
It may seem like an overkill, but such a system has two advantages over the traditional 'DDT' approach:
The latter is important: there are enough bugs involved already without the software variety getting in on the act.
An excerpt:
"A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the "Star Wars" defense system to knockout Soviet missiles with laser beams. They are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito. In a Seattle lab, researchers watched a glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light. This particular test used a non-lethal laser. But the Cold War missile-defense strategy will soon be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito Destruction. [...] Technology might one day draw a laser barrier around a house or village that could kill or blind the bugs...."
"...Not only can the laser target a mosquito, it can also tell a male from a female based on wing-beat."
Update: as of February 16th 2010 the Intellectual Ventures Lab is producing a system they are calling a Photonic Fence, which shoots down mosquitoes in as a method of preventing the spread of Malaria.
Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers: Wall Street Journal, Mar 15, 2009
Malaria: Intellectual Ventures Lab, Feb 16, 2010