Bugged no more: Alaskans rejoice insecticide is back in stock

ANCHORAGE — Customers accused shop owners of hoarding the stuff. Trappers called them unprintable names. Old-time Alaskans moaned their disappointment at the empty store shelves.

All this over an ochre-colored powder with a barnyard smell.

Now Buhach is back after a three-year absence and merchants throughout Alaska are hustling to stock their shelves with bright yellow canisters of the insecticide that has been popular on the West Coast for nearly 100 years.

"People would hurt me to get at some," said Gary Lorenzen, a buyer for Samson True Value Hardware in Fairbanks. He quickly ran out of the 700 canisters from his first shipment and doubled his next order from the manufacturer — The Buhach Co., a small family-owned business based on Mercer Island.

"We were expecting a slow interest in the insecticide business again, but as soon as the customers knew we had it again, they were like 'Where have you been?' " said Francine Norwood, whose family has owned the business for 22 years.

Alaska, host each summer to hordes of mosquitoes and other bugs, is the top market for the brand, but The Buhach Co. does a brisk business in Washington and Oregon as well.

The recent shortage was the result of droughts followed by flooding in East Africa, where farmers grow 85 percent of the world's pyrethrum flowers, the main ingredient in Buhach and also used in other insecticide products. Political unrest there also put a clamp on the supply, Norwood said.

"It's been really difficult. We even ran out of the family supply," she said. "People were calling us and saying, 'We need some Buhach.' We told them we needed some, too.

"People are just ecstatic to have it back."

Buhach has gained an almost mythical status as a cure-all for pests as well as other ills. It is considered an organic pesticide, sprinkled in gardens to eliminate insects, burned in heaps to ward off mosquitoes and used on lynx and marten pelts to kill fleas, which generally don't bother dogs and cats in Alaska.

Alaskans are by far the most dedicated users, constituting as much as 60 percent of the company's sales, Norwood said.

Fur trappers brought the stuff up the West Coast during the Gold Rush of the 1890s, she said, spreading the product and the word all over the West.

Many customers get the product through gardening catalogs, and it used to sell at Northwest garden stores such as Molbak's.

"People love their Buhach," said Kent Harrington, general manager of V.F. Grace, an Anchorage-based wholesale distributor with clients all over Alaska. "People find something that works and they don't want to change."

Fans say Buhach is an effective deterrent to Alaska's many bugs. It is lethal to insects but relatively harmless to humans and other warm-blooded mammals, although it can cause skin irritation and itching in some people.

According to the label, Buhach is 1 percent pyrethrins, the generic name for six active compounds derived from the pyrethrum plant, a species of chrysanthemum. The rest of it is powdered pyrethrum flowers, also used in veterinary medicines, food crops and lice shampoo for humans.

The story goes that a woman in the mid-1800s was drying out some pyrethrums she'd picked and discovered a small colony of dead bugs scattered around the bouquet.

The product has been sold under the Buhach label since the 1870s. It originally was manufactured from pyrethrum flowers grown at Buhach Colony, southeast of San Francisco in Merced County. But the crop proved too erosive for the soil, Norwood said.

Her father-in-law, Lee Norwood, bought the failing company in 1981, intending to turn it around and then sell it himself.

But he liked the product so much he decided to keep it, and the family has been crushing and mixing the flowers ever since.

Buhach is expensive compared with synthetic insecticides. But customers are willing to pay between $10 and $14 for an 8-ounce canister. Norwood says they've sold thousands of 12-canister cases in the past few months.

John Burns, a Lake Minchumina trapper and fur buyer, swears by the stuff when it comes to getting rid of fleas on lynx and marten pelts. He places a pelt in a bag sprinkled with Buhach and the bugs jump right off.

"Obviously, it's fatal to them," he said.

Since Burns lives in a remote area of Alaska's interior, he had plenty on hand when the supply dried up. But he was beginning to run low when it appeared again — just in time for mosquito season.

"I was happy. For me, nothing else fills the void," he said. "You don't know how bad it can get until you go out and the mosquitoes practically carry you away."

Seattle Times reporter Lisa Heyamoto contributed to this report.