Insects are attracted to low wavelength light, which includes both UV and blue light. Cool color LEDs are usually blue LEDs, and are often used for headlights/etc because they get higher lumen ratings for the power used. Headlights/lightbars are also really bright compared to porch lights.

If you compare an incandescent soft white porch light to a similar brightness soft white led light, you will probably see dramatically more insects at the incandescent bulb. .

The color configurable bulbs or the high CRI bulbs typically use a 400nm led source and some do use a 380nm but those are much rarer and expensive. Also almost any amount of plastic or glass will significantly absorb that wavelength of UV.

I have a 405nm laser pointer and it makes certain things (any% titanium dioxide) absurdly bright from fluorescence. So you probably aren’t getting UV from those bulbs, but certainly some IR.

Yeah, we have solar powered LED lights in the walking path where I live and the lights are covered with them. They look nasty.

This. It likely depends on the driving technology. Some repell me too :P

Note you can make LEDs dim without PWM via constant current drivers, just less efficient as the duty cycle is 100%, they look much nicer though

The streetlights in my neighborhood still have the round photo sensors on top, that have something like a watt of standby current for the sensor itself. I don't think they're trying hard to save powwer.

Don't forget about flicker free dimmable LEDs. I install them in my house.

The article bluntly states: "Moonlight contains ultraviolet (UV) and infrared wavelengths because it is merely reflected sunlight. Insects cue on UV, believing it to be the moon. . . . Incandescent lights transmit UV but LEDs do not. Insects are far less attracted to LED."

However, my mind developed a similar conjecture to your's: what if the common frequencies of PWM occur within a kinetic visual blindspot of insect vision, like human saccades [0] in the novel Blindsight [1], so that insects are not aware of the LED at all?

0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10991/

1. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#:~:text=%22There...

a conclusion can be right even if an argument for it is wrong.

I get quite a few insects that fly around a camera, and that is near-ir. So many that a spider finds it worth it's while to build a web in front.

Do they cluster around the bulbs? If not, they might not be attracted to the lights.

Install a single incandescent somewhere and be less mystified by the claim.

They didn't say no bug ever goes to any led light.

I think it’s to do with the LED flicker. You can sometimes see it in your peripheral vision (ie your light/dark receptors) but your RGB cones aren’t as good at spotting it.

Insects eyes are biologically very different.

With LED lighting, if you have lots of spot lights in the ceiling and and open door, you’ll likely find that the light leaving the house is a bath of reflection from different sources inside the house and that likely cancels out the worst of the flicker.

There is no such thing as refresh rate for any kind of eye.

The gold standard for mothing is a mercury vapor bulb. They are pricey and power-hungry, but they'll have your sheet covered in bugs in no time!

The best light.

The answer to that is pesticides. There's still plenty of insects ready to smash into your windshield in many parts of the world.

wow this would be a neat twist if true - we all defaulted to the negative explanation of having killed them all where a much more positive explanation might be that we're no longer luring them to their deaths at the leading edge of automobiles?

I guess it is most likely some combination of the above, but if there's any evidence it would be a neat reframing

My hypothesis is better wind tunnel testing for modern cars so that the bugs go over instead of splatting.

Yes, but how much UV depends on what's burnin / how hot its burning. Otherwise they mostly put out IR.

We use UV/IR combo Flame detectors at work for this purpose.

lived with candles and kerocene lanterns, etc for years and the odd bug will go nuts and spiral in, but not very many but all in all, there are way less bugs everywhere now

a little but not much, from my quick look online.

No but they emit smoke