from a previous correspondence on this topic:

>>The underside of my porch is blue and has an interesting effect.
We have lots of hummingbirds here in the summer, and I have a
feeder out in the porch area. Occasionally the hummers will get
"trapped" under the porch roof. They always attempt to fly "up" in
this situation, which traps them even worse. I don't know if this
is a programmed reaction, or if the blue on the underside of the
porch roof confuses them.<<

I ran across some folk wisdom on blue porch ceilings when I was on a project
down in southern Alabama and Georgia. The ceilings are painted blue to keep
the flies and mud wasps from leaving their deposits on them. They think it
is the sky and don't attempt to land there. At an amazing Italinate inn in
Euphala, Alabama ("Euphala" -- I just love these southern town names:
Euphala, Opalica, Taladega) we saw a demonstration of this. A section of the
ceiling was just painted original blue and a section was painted white. The
white section was covered with fly specs and mud dabber nests, the blue
section was clean as a whistle -- same paint, same porch, the only
difference was the color.

If you want to save yourself a lot of work cleaning the porch ceiling,
wouldn't you tell the person in charge that blue keeps out the ghosts if
that's what it took to get a blue ceiling? "I "hainte" got no time to be
scrubbing that porch ceiling all summer long."

I suspect the bugs, see the ceiling as open sky and so do not land there.
The birds must think it is the sky too.

John Leeke, Preservation Consultant

publisher:               Practical Restoration Reports
contributing editor: Old-House Journal
postal:                    26 Higgins St., Portland, Maine  04103, USA
phone & fax:           01 207 773-2306
email:                      [log in to unmask]
website:                  www.HistoricHomeWorks.com