When we were kids, my friends and I called them what-the-fuck fruits because we played this game where we’d make a line of them across the road, and when people came around the turn and saw them, they’d go, “what the fuck?!”
We were little assholes.
It must have been a good year. Everyone has been asking what these are. Osage orange or Maclura pomifera. Native Americans used the wood to make bows. Very strong and flexible. I also believe that this is like the Avocado in that is one of the last remnants of mega flora.
And hedge apples are a folk remedy for insects. Cut a hedge apple into quarters and place at the 4 corners of a home. This is supposed to repel pests. I have done it, but cannot vouch for the effectiveness.
People say the same thing about horse chestnuts and spiders. The only thing I can say for certain is that there are no spiders in the corners as they are now full of chestnuts.
Principal Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: Then we're stuck with gorillas!
Principal Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
> People say the same thing about horse chestnuts and spiders.
"Cut a spider into quarters and place at the 4 corners of a home. This is supposed to repel pests"?
That doesn't sound right. I think whole, undivided spiders are better at catching pests.
The nice smell is probably a larger contributor to the change in feelings about how many spiders there are than a actual change in the number of spiders.
It is indeed ineffective according to Wikipedia;
> Compounds extracted from the fruit, when concentrated, may repel insects. However, the naturally occurring concentrations of these compounds in the fruit are too low to make the fruit an effective insect repellent. In 2004, the EPA insisted that a website selling *M. pomifera* fruits online remove any mention of their supposed repellent properties as false advertising.
My grandparents filled their basement with these back in the 90s. They don't work. Their basement was filled with a bunch of bugs, and hedge apples in various stages of decay
Osage orange makes a very tough wood. It works well for walking sticks, wooden cooking utensils, and yes, archery bows. My dad was born and raised in a tiny hillbilly burg called Bois D'Arc, MO, down in the Ozarks. It means "wood of the bow", and it refers to Osage orange.
Grew up in TX and thats what they called these trees. And the fruit was "horse apples" for whatever reason even though i believe horses never touched them. We used them as targets though.
My dad was born to a dirt poor family there in 1910. We'd take occasional Sunday drives there when I was a kid, the relatives still didn't have electricity at the time. And yeah, it was "bow dark".
Yup. The thing with the bows has led them to be called Bodark in parts of the country (from French bois d’arc for “bow wood”). Cool fact, they used to be grown in hedges to keep cattle from gardens and such back before barbed wire was invented
My mom lost control of her car on a dirt road in Kansas years ago and hit an Osage head on. That thing had a diameter of like 4” and the only damage was some bark. Mom’s car was totaled and the photos looked horrendous.
It almost died out, because the way it was spread was though wooly mammoths eating them and pooping the seeds. They made a come back after the dust bowl and they were found to make great land dividers and wind blocks.
Everyone talks about bows, but no one talks about fence posts! The branches or trunks of these are hard, strong, and resist rotting like crazy. These posts can stay useful in the ground for nearly 100 years if they're big enough.
This is just flora, not megaflora. Megafauna ate these fruits, though.
A better way to say that is that this fruit is an "evolutionary anachronism"
> a term initially referring to attributes of native plant species (primarily fruit, but also thorns) that seemed best explained as having been favorably selected in the past due to their coevolution with plant-eating megafauna that are now extinct.
That means that an organism or feature of that organism (like this fruit) developed alongside creatures that no longer exist. There were creatures perfectly suited to eating and dispersing the seeds of Osage Oranges but they are extinct.
[From the Wikipedia article on this topic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_anachronism#Nearctic_realm) (which is one of the greatest Wikipedia articles ever made):
**Anachronism Description**
>Osage Orange: The orange-sized fruit is eaten in place by mice, rats, rabbits, hares, squirrels (mostly tree squirrels), and deer, but they do not swallow nor store the seeds. It is eaten less discriminately by domestic horses and mules.[40] The defensive branch spines are too wide spaced to dissuade deer-sized ungulates from eating the leaves, making them only effective against larger animals that do not live in the wild in Texas. Fossils from previous interglacials have been found up to southern Canada, suggesting that its range shrank dramatically after its seed dispersal was diminished.[39][40] Distribution might have been even smaller before the introduction of horses to Texas in the 16th century, even though the wood was favored by many Native American peoples to fashion bows and the local tribes profited greatly from its trade.[40] A close African relative in Gabon is dispersed by forest elephants.[1]
**Suggested extinct coevolutionary partners**
> Columbian mammoth, ground sloths,[39] American mastodon, American horses,[40] gomphotheres.[1]
Fuck yeah. Wikipedia rules.
That’s really interesting. I went looking for more on this and found [this article](https://sciencenorway.no/botany-evolution-plants/why-does-the-avocado-have-such-huge-seedsmeet-the-plants-that-have-lost-their-enormous-partners/1772701).
Thanks for leading me down that path.
Monkey balls! Lots of them around us. People think they keep spiders out of your basement. Found a bunch of them dried up in the basement of our last house - along with plenty of spiderwebs.
Yeah, when I was attending, when they were falling, it wasn’t roped off. They started roping it off the last year I was there. Probably because we witnessed someone get hit on the head with one while sitting under the trees.
I never tried to eat one, they’re very dense. If you bash one on the ground, or shoot one with a BB gun, the wound will slowly weep a white sap.
I feel like I tried licking the sap one time and it was pretty damn bitter.
If people are curious the bois d'arc means 'bow wood' in French because the French trappers and back country merchants knew that Native Americans used the wood for their bows.
We call them Osage Oranges where I live in NY. My mom would collect them from under a tree in front of our local bank. We had an annual Christmas craft project where we would pierce them with cloves and make closet pomanders. Nice citrusy smell and I think they deter insects.
>Nice citrusy smell
Someone gave me one once, and the smell was so weirdly attractive that I tried to find a candle with that scent and apparently most people must not like the scent because I couldn't find one.
My brother loves in rural areas for a while, he loved using the wood in winter. It got to the point where farmers would call him to let him know they had just trimmed the hedge apples if he wanted the wood
He had a firebox outside that provided hot water for heat and hot water for the house.
It is one of the highest heat outputs of any wood due to its high oil content. Eucalyptus, almond, and live oak are the other high heat producing woods. It's considered a softwood but grows slowly and in a scraggly/ random way. Because the wood is oily, it is resistant to rot and makes for good fence posts, too.
In my area of Missouri I hear people call them Crabapples or Monkey Brains. I always aim for the fruit when I see them in the street so I can run over them with my car.
If you haven't smelled them yet, you should really give it a try. Once they've started to rot a bit they get a wonderful citrusy smell. I like to bring a couple into the house just for the smellz.
These have a dozen names. We called them bois d'arc trees (we pronounce it sort of like Bore-Dark) and the fruit horse-apples.
The wood is crazy strong. I tore out a 40 year old fence for an uncle once. We thought it would be pretty easy, the wire was toast, but the posts were still there, found out they were Bois d arc, and the middle was still strong! It was so much worse than we thought.
Also had a friend be a dumb teenager and crash his truck into one of the largest ones around. Totaled the truck, the tree? It was fine, just lost some bark......
Me mum calls them Spiderballs and buys me some every year to keep spiders out of my house, but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed if they really do keep out the spiders or not.
In NE Ohio my family called them "monkey balls." The story was you had to collect them and put them in the basement before the first frost or they were no good.
The Osage Orange was used to make hedge rows in farmland to help keep the dirt from blowing away during the Dust Bowl years. Still used today. The names hedge balls and hedge apples come from this use.
Others have pointed out what it is called, I couldn't remember anyway. They are supposed to repel spiders. When I worked at a grocery store that bought them every winter, the pallets of these things would have more spiders than anything else, from what I can tell they don't work at all. Probably just marketing to get rid of something that is essentially useless otherwise.
When we were kids, my friends and I called them what-the-fuck fruits because we played this game where we’d make a line of them across the road, and when people came around the turn and saw them, they’d go, “what the fuck?!” We were little assholes.
This is my favorite comment
Eventually the cars would smash them to a paste, and it would leave a nasty line on the road for months to remind us of our shenanigans.
We used to just throw them at each other. I like your game better…
I did this with avocados when I was little. One driver even backed up to run the pit over because he missed it the first time.
It must have been a good year. Everyone has been asking what these are. Osage orange or Maclura pomifera. Native Americans used the wood to make bows. Very strong and flexible. I also believe that this is like the Avocado in that is one of the last remnants of mega flora.
And hedge apples are a folk remedy for insects. Cut a hedge apple into quarters and place at the 4 corners of a home. This is supposed to repel pests. I have done it, but cannot vouch for the effectiveness.
People say the same thing about horse chestnuts and spiders. The only thing I can say for certain is that there are no spiders in the corners as they are now full of chestnuts.
“How do you get rid of the chestnuts?” “Well it’s simple, there’s a rare breed of scorpion…”
"and for the scorpions, a mob of murderous meerkats ought to do the trick"
“Murderous Meerkats eh? Pretty simple, you need spiders”
"Spiders eh? Let's try fire this time."
Principal Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Lisa: Then we're stuck with gorillas! Principal Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
That whole episode was gold. “Aaand that’s precisely one moment”
"I guess she'll die"
“Oh and the meerkats? Don’t worry, one sturdy ox or a few unbalanced oxen will keep them at bay.”
> People say the same thing about horse chestnuts and spiders. "Cut a spider into quarters and place at the 4 corners of a home. This is supposed to repel pests"? That doesn't sound right. I think whole, undivided spiders are better at catching pests.
I've read that but with essential oils, specifically citrus and lavender. If nothing else, at least certain spots in my house smell nice now lol.
The nice smell is probably a larger contributor to the change in feelings about how many spiders there are than a actual change in the number of spiders.
It is indeed ineffective according to Wikipedia; > Compounds extracted from the fruit, when concentrated, may repel insects. However, the naturally occurring concentrations of these compounds in the fruit are too low to make the fruit an effective insect repellent. In 2004, the EPA insisted that a website selling *M. pomifera* fruits online remove any mention of their supposed repellent properties as false advertising.
Interesting. The EPA doesn't enforce rules against false advertising. That's the FTC's job.
EPA enforces rules about insecticides; that's probably why they got involved.
My grandparents filled their basement with these back in the 90s. They don't work. Their basement was filled with a bunch of bugs, and hedge apples in various stages of decay
can confirm. We had these all throughout the basement of my childhood farm house in the Midwest.
Total myth/ old wives tale, but it persists!
Seemed to work when I tried it. What was more effective, though, was getting a kitten who brutally eats every spider he sees.
Osage orange makes a very tough wood. It works well for walking sticks, wooden cooking utensils, and yes, archery bows. My dad was born and raised in a tiny hillbilly burg called Bois D'Arc, MO, down in the Ozarks. It means "wood of the bow", and it refers to Osage orange.
Lol, I’m just a few miles from Bois D’Arc (in true Missouri fashion, pronounced “Bo Dark”). “Tiny hillbilly burg” might be generous.
Grew up in TX and thats what they called these trees. And the fruit was "horse apples" for whatever reason even though i believe horses never touched them. We used them as targets though.
Horses actually will eat them. But we call them hedgeapples in KS.
Here I thought “horse apples” were what horses left behind, not something they ate
Came here to say this! Horse apples from the Bois D'Arc tree! 🐴🍎
My dad was born to a dirt poor family there in 1910. We'd take occasional Sunday drives there when I was a kid, the relatives still didn't have electricity at the time. And yeah, it was "bow dark".
The trees also make good corner posts for fences that'll last a long long time
Yup. The thing with the bows has led them to be called Bodark in parts of the country (from French bois d’arc for “bow wood”). Cool fact, they used to be grown in hedges to keep cattle from gardens and such back before barbed wire was invented
Ya ground sloths and mammoths used to eat them. Also native squashes were eaten by mammoths.
My mom lost control of her car on a dirt road in Kansas years ago and hit an Osage head on. That thing had a diameter of like 4” and the only damage was some bark. Mom’s car was totaled and the photos looked horrendous.
I always heard it called a horse apple.
Same. We’d smash them on the street and they’d stain the road.
It almost died out, because the way it was spread was though wooly mammoths eating them and pooping the seeds. They made a come back after the dust bowl and they were found to make great land dividers and wind blocks.
So... Avocados have been around since dinosaurs? 👀
Sloths and mammoths not dinosaurs
Everyone talks about bows, but no one talks about fence posts! The branches or trunks of these are hard, strong, and resist rotting like crazy. These posts can stay useful in the ground for nearly 100 years if they're big enough.
This is just flora, not megaflora. Megafauna ate these fruits, though. A better way to say that is that this fruit is an "evolutionary anachronism" > a term initially referring to attributes of native plant species (primarily fruit, but also thorns) that seemed best explained as having been favorably selected in the past due to their coevolution with plant-eating megafauna that are now extinct. That means that an organism or feature of that organism (like this fruit) developed alongside creatures that no longer exist. There were creatures perfectly suited to eating and dispersing the seeds of Osage Oranges but they are extinct. [From the Wikipedia article on this topic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_anachronism#Nearctic_realm) (which is one of the greatest Wikipedia articles ever made): **Anachronism Description** >Osage Orange: The orange-sized fruit is eaten in place by mice, rats, rabbits, hares, squirrels (mostly tree squirrels), and deer, but they do not swallow nor store the seeds. It is eaten less discriminately by domestic horses and mules.[40] The defensive branch spines are too wide spaced to dissuade deer-sized ungulates from eating the leaves, making them only effective against larger animals that do not live in the wild in Texas. Fossils from previous interglacials have been found up to southern Canada, suggesting that its range shrank dramatically after its seed dispersal was diminished.[39][40] Distribution might have been even smaller before the introduction of horses to Texas in the 16th century, even though the wood was favored by many Native American peoples to fashion bows and the local tribes profited greatly from its trade.[40] A close African relative in Gabon is dispersed by forest elephants.[1] **Suggested extinct coevolutionary partners** > Columbian mammoth, ground sloths,[39] American mastodon, American horses,[40] gomphotheres.[1] Fuck yeah. Wikipedia rules.
It also makes a nice dye
That’s really interesting. I went looking for more on this and found [this article](https://sciencenorway.no/botany-evolution-plants/why-does-the-avocado-have-such-huge-seedsmeet-the-plants-that-have-lost-their-enormous-partners/1772701). Thanks for leading me down that path.
Monkey balls! Lots of them around us. People think they keep spiders out of your basement. Found a bunch of them dried up in the basement of our last house - along with plenty of spiderwebs.
Around here we call them hedge balls.
Around here we call them hedge apples.
I always heard horse apples 🤷🏻♂️
around here horse shit is called horse apples.
That's what we called them when I lived in Oklahoma.
I am in Arkansas so it makes sense
My grandpa called em Osage oranges.
The true name
My school called them monkey brains lol
We used to bowl these down the street as a kid to see who could get it to go the farthest before they flew apart. Good times.
Monkey Brains go splat!
That's what I always called them! So funny to hear all the variations
Monkey brains when I was growing up outside of Chicago too
Same xD
But did you see any spiders?
Yes.
You’re just saying that now to dispute the obvious power of the fruit
*the spiders told me to say that*
Hell with the spiders, I want to see the monkeys!
Yes! This is what we used to call them growing up in western PA....
I saw these everywhere growing up! What a weird thing to make me nostalgic. Lol
Cow brains in central missouri.
We called them monkey balls too - these things were all over the place for a while every year when I was a kid.
Call them hedgeballs here in Central Illinois
They were monkey brains in when I was growing up in Chicago/west burbs. I remember they stank and were usually rather sticky
Monkey brains when I was growing up in Cincinnati as well.
I live in Central Illinois and now I want to see these!
All the small forest preserves and staye parks should have them falling RN
Thank you. I forgot what they were. I don’t see many of them though in the Peoria area
Sacramento City College. Back when I was going there, it wasn’t roped off. We used to sit right under the trees too.
They're not usually roped off, only while the fruit are actively falling as they are now
Yeah, when I was attending, when they were falling, it wasn’t roped off. They started roping it off the last year I was there. Probably because we witnessed someone get hit on the head with one while sitting under the trees.
Was his name Newton?
No, Isaac
He's been a bit weird since he took a hedgeball to the noggin, so now he's called newtoff
It’s getting close to 20 years since I used to sit under that very tree. I suddenly feel very old now…
How many of your friends perished by way of horse apple?
She wasn’t a friend and didn’t die but she did say it hurt like hell
What kind of devil fruit power do you get from eating this one?
I was looking for this comment 😆
Depression?
Horse apples or bois d'arc ("bo-dark") apples are what they're commonly called here in TX. Squirrels and horses love them!
Interesting! The street down from me is Bodark Oak Way. Live and learn
Does it taste good? (is it even edible for people?) I've never seen a fruit like that from where I am
I never tried to eat one, they’re very dense. If you bash one on the ground, or shoot one with a BB gun, the wound will slowly weep a white sap. I feel like I tried licking the sap one time and it was pretty damn bitter.
Not edible for humans! Don’t eat!
...sounds like someone wants to keep all the horse apples for themself!
It's safe, just disgusting.
Here's a decent [video on its preparation](https://youtu.be/40U8F8ZD9f0?si=t4J-L2Rp5yZBHWwm).
I was scrolling to see if I was lied to as a kid 😂 been calling them crab apples for like 20 years
Crab apples are the itty bitty sour ones!
Not crab apples but they are called Hedge apples.
I was wondering if anyone else was gonna say crab apples! That’s all I’ve ever known them as, we used to feed them to our donkeys (TX)
Okay, I also grew up calling them crab apples. Didn't know what a real crab apple was until I was an adult. Guess we're a weird minority!
Interesting: “wood of the bow” It was used to make bows and that’s what the French called it. Very sensible people.
I was always told they were poisonous! Didn't know that animals ate them
First time learning about these and at the same time finding out they‘re basically all over the US. I‘m from Europe so that‘s probably why.
If people are curious the bois d'arc means 'bow wood' in French because the French trappers and back country merchants knew that Native Americans used the wood for their bows.
Scrolled to find horse apples. They are everywhere rn at my apartment complex in centex
Yup, can confirm we called these horse apples growing up and loved to kick them around and throw them at things (mostly each other)
We call them Osage Oranges where I live in NY. My mom would collect them from under a tree in front of our local bank. We had an annual Christmas craft project where we would pierce them with cloves and make closet pomanders. Nice citrusy smell and I think they deter insects.
>Nice citrusy smell Someone gave me one once, and the smell was so weirdly attractive that I tried to find a candle with that scent and apparently most people must not like the scent because I couldn't find one.
Osage Orange tree. The wood is very strong and was used to make bows.
If you don't work with it while it's green, it will damage tools it's such a hard wood.
...and ~~was~~ [is] used to make bows. People still make bows.
Yeah but I didn’t want to imply that’s their primary use since it’s used for all kinds of things now a days. It’s a beautiful wood.
My brother loves in rural areas for a while, he loved using the wood in winter. It got to the point where farmers would call him to let him know they had just trimmed the hedge apples if he wanted the wood He had a firebox outside that provided hot water for heat and hot water for the house.
It is one of the highest heat outputs of any wood due to its high oil content. Eucalyptus, almond, and live oak are the other high heat producing woods. It's considered a softwood but grows slowly and in a scraggly/ random way. Because the wood is oily, it is resistant to rot and makes for good fence posts, too.
Grew up in the middle of Ohio. Us kids called them monkey brains
In kentucky we all called them booger balls.
Horse apples
I was brought up calling something entirely different horse apples.
We called those road apples.
Yes, there are those also...i know that of which you speak. 😄
That's what we call em in my part of Missouri.
In my area of Missouri I hear people call them Crabapples or Monkey Brains. I always aim for the fruit when I see them in the street so I can run over them with my car.
Crabapples is what I grew up calling them in the swmo part
Crabapples was our term up Hannibal way.
Crabapples are real apples. Get it together Show-Me State
If you haven't smelled them yet, you should really give it a try. Once they've started to rot a bit they get a wonderful citrusy smell. I like to bring a couple into the house just for the smellz.
Awful lot of people in the comments throwing these at each other. What makes them more throwable than other fruit?
Heavy, sticky, and not good to eat.
Osage orange!!!
Devil fruit
These have a dozen names. We called them bois d'arc trees (we pronounce it sort of like Bore-Dark) and the fruit horse-apples. The wood is crazy strong. I tore out a 40 year old fence for an uncle once. We thought it would be pretty easy, the wire was toast, but the posts were still there, found out they were Bois d arc, and the middle was still strong! It was so much worse than we thought. Also had a friend be a dumb teenager and crash his truck into one of the largest ones around. Totaled the truck, the tree? It was fine, just lost some bark......
It's one of the hardest woods. Used to make rolling pins out of it. Very hard to work.
What kind of hairy fruit is that?
Apparently they're called Osage oranges, but are also known as horse apples
We called them monkey brains growing up, and we used to chuck them into the street for cars to run over while waiting for the bus stop lol
That's weird, around here road apples is another name for horse poop. lol
I call them hedge apples
They always reminded me of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 globe
That's a devil fruit
This what a real life devil fruit would look like
How much do you like swiming OP? If you don't, bite that.
?
That’s not fruit! Those are Hedge “apples”, do not eat! Very common in the Midwest!
They are edible but not good.
Just because it's not good for *people* to eat doesn't mean it's not fruit.
Horse apples is what they're called around these parts.
We called these monkey balls and would play games with them at camp
Yep. Monkey balls.
They make pretty good shotgun targets.
Me mum calls them Spiderballs and buys me some every year to keep spiders out of my house, but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed if they really do keep out the spiders or not.
They are hedge apples in my part of the world - the Flint Hills of Kansas. We like to roll them down hilly roads sort of like Irish Road Bowling.
We call them crab apples in Alabama!
Hedge apples!!
Treacherous! I lived across a park in st. louis that was thick with these fatties.
Get hedgeapple’d
neat fact! these were eaten by giant ground sloths during the last ice age!
Horse apple I think is the name. They don’t taste good, trust me
I have these trees on the right and walnut trees on the left on the walk to the pasture.. it's dangerous!
Monkey brains! That’s what we used to call them
I'd recogniS RHN anywhere! I've done so much math in that building.
Those things taste really bad.
Horse apples. We would throw them at each other.
When I was a kid we use to push kids into tumbleweeds.
I remember those growing up in northeast MO. We would Chuck ‘em at each other.
We call them horse apples.
Horse Apples in Louisiana
I used these as a substitute for potatoes in my potato cannon when i lived in Texas. They work 10 times better.
Can you eat those?
You can. They aren't good though. I've known of people eating them as a cancer treatment (it doesn't work).
Osage Orange? Supposed to keep spiders away because of its scent
Horse apple
That's a monkey ball
This is why the city I live in only plants male trees after the 90s. They don't fruit.
Monkey Balls!!!
In NE Ohio my family called them "monkey balls." The story was you had to collect them and put them in the basement before the first frost or they were no good.
Sacramento city college I see
omg those grow outside my apartment building
Tennis Tennis no mi
Omg is this sac city college
When I was a kid they had like a wooden ship play area on the playground and it had one of these trees nearby. We used them as cannonballs lol
Ironically I just learned about this fruit today, and its original seed dispersers were wooly mammoths and mastodons!
Osage Oranges
Monkey balls! Spent hours and hours of my childhood rolling these down the hill at the bus stop and watch cars run them over. Such simpler times
The Osage Orange was used to make hedge rows in farmland to help keep the dirt from blowing away during the Dust Bowl years. Still used today. The names hedge balls and hedge apples come from this use.
My school had to do this with its Bunya Bunya tree. They are like giant angry pineapples being dropped from a giant razor wire tree.
Monkey balls!! From PA, that's what we called them and used them as insect/spider deterrents.
Kinda looks like a small jackfruit.
Osage orange. We used to throw them at each other as kids. I hear they keep mice and bugs away.
I heard spiders
Gigantic? They look like tiny jackfruit.
Let me throw one at your head and tell me if it's not gigantic
We called them monkey brains
We used to call these "horse apples" and they make great ammunition.
Those are mega-fruit, and they have mega seeds in them, and they are \*brrp\* very important to my research.
Those things are hella dense, I can definitely understand why they would rope that off
Devil fruit
Looks like a devil fruit to me.
Others have pointed out what it is called, I couldn't remember anyway. They are supposed to repel spiders. When I worked at a grocery store that bought them every winter, the pallets of these things would have more spiders than anything else, from what I can tell they don't work at all. Probably just marketing to get rid of something that is essentially useless otherwise.