How to control shine bugs

Early game shine bugs are very useful and can often be sufficient to support enough plants to feed your dupes. However controlling the shine bugs has proven impossible for me.

If I'm lucky enough to lock them in with doors in the same room as the plants in time, they usually stay in. However I haven't been able to catch them in a room with plants if they start outside. I usually end up using lights to grow my plants.

Attacking the shine bugs just destroys them, it cannot be used to chase them in a particular direction.

Is there a way to 'push' them in a room with plants?

Solution 1:

There are several options to do this.

1. Building a room around the shinebugs (as you already mentioned) ideally there are already some plants (Bristle Berries in that room)
2. Same as before but contents of room dont matter. Add a critter drop-off to that room and change it to auto-wrangling and 0 critters. Add another critter drop-off to a different room, where you want the critters to go. As soon as you have a rancher, they will wrangle and move all the critters to the other drop-off. (Argueably this is some kind of weak exploit)
3. Build a critter lure (quite mid-tech, requires plastic) and lure the shine bugs with some phosphorite to the lure. This seems to be the (developer) intended way to move flying critters. However it is rather slow, short-ranged and requires advanced resources (plastic). Once the critters are around the lure, it is quite stable though.
4. Just wait for the critters to lay eggs and move those eggs to the room you want them to go and hatch them there.

Solution 2:

Mealwood doesn't need light for growth, so early game just feed your dupes with mealwood, controlling the shine bugs won't matter.