I live near a swampy lake.
I _thought_ these would not make a dent in mosquito populations.
But all summer I've been able to sit outside without many bites, as long as I keep them rotated every month or so and stay away from the lake.
4 home depot buckets + a pack of dunks are magic.
For those asking - a bucket of sticks and leaves gets stagnat pretty quick. My guess is that it's so attractive that it just manages to attract most the mosquitos? I put one near the shore in two places, and two near the corners of my property. Our lake has just enough surface distrubance that the bucket might be better for them.
The problem with this solution is that if they get into a local waterway and they're not native, they can absolutely destroy it. Despite the name they eat a lot more than just insects, and can cause any native insectivore fish to basically starve to death.
tl;dw: Get a big drum fan with a screen on the back, attached with small/powerful magnets. Mosquitos are such poor flyers that they get pulled against the screen and can't escape, and they pretty quickly desiccate and die. Most other flying insects don't get caught, although there is a bit of collateral (some moths and lacewings, unfortunately). Another benefit of the fan is that you can hang out in front of it and mosquitos mostly won't bother you there either.
I did this in our shared backyard space in Brooklyn and would catch hundreds/thousands of mosquitos per week. Despite that, there were still a ton of mosquitos in the area so it's best combined with other methods of control.
I have a bug catcher that kind of looks like a Dyson bladeless fan but runs in reverse. Inside the ring, there's UV (?) LEDs to attract bugs. Once they fly in, the fan sucks them down into the base where there's a sticky paper. The base has a tight mesh around it so they are trapped if they somehow manage to not hit the sticky paper immediately. We use it for soil gnats but I've also seen some houseflies in there too.
I changed the video link to an updated version where he goes into much more detail. You don't need any lure (I didn't use any), but you can see in the updated link that he places the fans around where his dog sleeps and also uses a bottle of soda with the cap slightly unscrewed to slowly leak CO2.
In general though, if there are enough mosquitos around they will get caught in it without any additional effort.
One question - how does this prevent mosquitos from breeding in other bits of standing water that I can't locate?
I have no idea where ours are coming from; I suspect they hatch somewhere, and then migrate to the shaded areas of my yard, which is where I typically get bit.
Adding a bucket will prevent some mosquitoes from laying eggs elsewhere, but not all, right? Or is the bucket so attractive to mosquitoes that they ignore other water sources?
Our pest control put in a bucket called In2Care that has a little net with some powder suspended above the water - mosquito lands on the net, gets the powder on 'em, carries it to the next site and that site gets neutralized. They're designed for commercial campuses but for ~$200/yr it's well worth it for residential also.
They do take a while to take effect, and they do take maintenance, but my experience so far is that they're super effective.
My intuition is that you are correct: the bucket doesn't eliminate all breeding grounds. It's a numbers game: you want to lower the population as much as possible. If you reduce the population enough, nature has the opportunity to handle the rest, since mosquito reproduction is also a numbers game: mates have to locate one another. This also frustratingly means it won't be an instant solution even if it eventually works. It takes a few generations to realize the benefits of the lowered population.
Keep in mind that many mosquito species don't fly far too far from where they are born (in particular the very annoying tiger mosquito does'nt fly more than 100m) so treating your own garden might somewhat be effective (depending of housing density where you live).
treating your own garden means not leaving stagnant waters (including in water pots etc). then you can consider trap. also try to convince your close neighbours to do the same.
After checking the obvious like old tires or stagnant ditches or tire tracks, the more hidden breeding sites include house gutters, French drains (under the gravel), buried yard drains, and garage floor drains.
The general rule is that mosquitos need a pool of water the size of a bottle cap, and it needs to be there for at least a week. Good luck, and good hunting.
They don't. The basic idea is to put many of them up, so the chances of them using one instead of a puddle, etc are greater. I have about 20 smaller ovitraps up around my property.
You can also get traps that target the mature biting mosquitoes. Defense in depth!
Check out Biogents brand. They use attractants like urea and CO2 to draw the mosquitoes to the trap instead of your body. You'd put these closer to the areas you inhabit.
> One question - how does this prevent mosquitos from breeding in other bits of standing water that I can't locate?
It cannot and that is not its purpose. Practically you should be able to locate any other breeding grounds by mere observation and then you have to eliminate them one by one until the mosquitos are left with the ones you set up.
The key to this working is ensuring that the buckets are the only standing water around. If even 10% of the females decide to use your clogged gutter, broken water fountain, or forgotten livestock waterer instead of your buckets, you will still have a mosquito problem.
In other words, the real tip is to eliminate standing water.
This matches my experience. Building these buckets did nothing, and maybe made it worse. Putting 1/10th as much effort into eliminating standing water is what actually fixed my problem.
Remember, mosquitos can breed in a puddle the size of a bottle cap!
> Building these buckets did nothing, and maybe made it worse.
How could it have possibly made it worse? Even if it only prevented a small fraction of the mosquito population from reproducing it'd still be helping.
> Remember, mosquitos can breed in a puddle the size of a bottle cap!
There's been so much rain these past months that my entire yard has been filled with puddles. There's only so much you can do to eliminate standing water when it's everywhere.
Yeah, I tried using the dunks as-is when we first moved to the semi-woods and realized how Sisepheyan the task was. That said, this bucket approach is interesting.
Every time I have read science guys about things that you can do to kill mosquitos there is an analogy to putting a drain in the ocean. You can kill mosquitos at a fantastic rate but, unless you are also killing them in all your neighbor's yards for a mile around, they are just going to keep coming as fast as they die.
Mosquitos don't fly very fast or very far, and they breed extremely fast, so if you have nearby puddles you get a "local high density" zone. The inflow is so large that it never settles down to the expected steady state with uniform density.
It's the same reason you have a high density of sports fans when you stand near the exit of a stadium after a game. The people (mosquitos) are streaming out of the stadium (standing water) so fast that there's a local high-density zone.
I literally live in a swamp, so I reasoned "how much could one tire hurt?" Oh boy was I wrong! Eliminating that one single mosquito breeding site near the house made an enormous difference on the local mosquito density.
Bingo. We did these buckets, were very diligent about it. They appeared to work (at least in terms of attracting Mosquitos, which they're meant to do) but had no real effect generally. House next door is a rental, with a rotating cast of 20-somethings that do not keep up the yard and its filled with nice little habitats for Mosquitos.
One thing that an HOA might actually be good for - I would love to see what happens if our entire neighborhood did this.
I would love to live in a neighborhood full of meadow style gardens, where native plants are allowed to flower and feed bees, with bug habitats instead of neatly cut astroturf looking golf green lawns chock full of pesticides.
I can't understand the people that think the artificial look holds any beauty whatsoever.
You might have some success with talking to them, or even dropping a leaflet or a print out in their mailbox explaining the problem and encouraging them to check their yard for breeding grounds. A lot of folks (especially young ones) just don't think about that kind of thing, but very few people actually like mosquitos, so a polite reminder every couple years or when someone new moves in might do some good.
> One thing that an HOA might actually be good for
I've gotten nothing but benefits from living in neighborhoods with HOAs. Basic stuff like funding for landscapers to keep up the shared grassy areas along the streets, to plowing the access roads in winter time. But the main benefit has always been that it provides a legal mechanism to force everyone to maintain their yards and property. No need to drop passive-aggressive notes in a mailbox about people parking their cars on their lawns.
10/10 highly recommend
edit: apparently you guys don't like HOAs haha. Well I love them. Keeps the neighborhood from looking like a dump.
Mosquitos don't actually like to fly that far for their meal / breeding grounds, and yes you should absolutely be buying these for your neighbors. Make a little gift basket
I agree in the sense that if everyone did their part, the outcome would be meaningful.
This is not to say that traps don’t make your house more livable. Once, I lived in a house connected to a forest in Brazil—no real neighbors, and a shitload of mosquitoes.
I did buy some fancy traps with UV lights and fans, and oh boy, I killed a shitload of them. Not to say I fully solved the mosquito problem, but I significantly reduced the bites. My wife is allergic to them, so she’s a great sensor—if there’s even one mosquito in the room, she knows.
The UV light traps attract all sorts of insects that aren't female mosquitos looking for a blood meal. They can catch mosquitos too, but probably not super well. A trap focusing on the scents they follow from humans would do more with less collateral damage.
I've been using a 20 lb CO2 tank to bait mosquitos into an enclosure with a fan which provides gentle suction, with a fair amount of success.
This method does reduce numbers from areas that are not under your control, but the "dunks" are probably still the cheapest easiest treatment for local buggers
This. My old neighbor had a broken hot tub that would breed thousands of mosquitoes. Buying the fancy, $200, german made trap was satisfying because of how many it caught but it didn't keep you from being bit.
Currently I've been using these to deal with fungus gnats in my indoor plants; they are quite effective, just put one in my watering can, keep the watering can full so it can steep, and water as normal. It kills the larvae in the same way and after about a month I had no more fungus gnat problem (after trying many other things with no success)
I do wonder about the eventual mosquito adaption to this if it is employed on a large scale though.
This bacterial strain was discovered in 1976, but has been in the environment for a long time. Resistance should have already emerged?
"As a toxic mechanism, cry proteins bind to specific receptors on the membranes of mid-gut (epithelial) cells of the targeted pests, resulting in their rupture. Other organisms (including humans, other animals and non-targeted insects) that lack the appropriate receptors in their gut cannot be affected by the cry protein, and therefore are not affected by Bt."
Edit: "Spores and crystalline insecticidal proteins produced by B. thuringiensis have been used to control insect pests since the 1920s and are often applied as liquid sprays and donut pellets."
It does exist in nature all over, but it generally isn't in such a high concentration. Its like releasing 1,000 goats in your backyard. Even if your backyard could support a few goats, it will certainly be destroyed by 1,000 of them.
Note that instead of the mosquito dunks you can also buy "mosquito bits" which are the same thing in granular form. Last time I bought one they were cheaper per unit cost and they easier to use because you don't have to break them up.
For some reason mosquito dunks can be shipped to California but not mosquito bits, according to Amazon. They look to be the same thing to me. Anyone know the reason? Maybe it is an Amazon data error?
I've seen several cases like this on Amazon, where products are not available to ship to California but should be. In one case I even spoke to the manufacturer who said they got it fixed, then weeks later it was unavailable again.
There's clearly something going on where their systems are being extra cautious on what can and cannot be shipped to CA.
I tried the water based approach before and didn't work, but this may be a good one. What does work for me is a CO2 based trap. I have 4 neighbors on the street using them now. Mosquitos follow CO2 to find their targets, and get sucked into the bucket. Its kind of expensive (upfront cost of about $200 then about $60 in CO2 per summer, but I have a large bag full of mosquitos regularly so i know it works. And I can tell when the CO2 runs out because mosquiotos are back.
CO2 seems to be extremely effective in general, but what I really want is for someone to create a commercial version of something I saw DIY'd on Reddit. They used safely-contained smoldering coals placed behind a high-speed outdoor fan, with mosquito netting secured loosely (but with no gaps) to the front of the fan.
The fan intakes CO2 from the coals... and blows it out into the neighborhood (I think he claimed it was detectable at 60 or 80 feet?) to essentially advertise. When mosquitos approach, they're sucked into the fan intake, and can't get out past the blades and netting. Most are dead by morning, and the rest you spray down before removal. IIRC he said he only needed to do it one night every few weeks to keep the population unnoticeable, and he'd wake up to thousands in the netting the next morning.
I'm sketched-out by the CO2 mechanism, so I've never tried it, but figuring out an extremely slow release mechanism from a small tank seems doable. Maybe one day I'll get around to tinkering with it. My neighborhood started spraying, so it hasn't been bad enough to put much effort into.
I don't have a mosquito trapping solution, but wanted to also offer help to anyone harassed by mosquitos: Despite being a magnet for mosquitos, I've found a coconut-based moisturiser to be more effective than even "tropical-strength" repellants. I used to use various repellants and still get bitten, but this moisturiser is hilariously effective. (Brand is Palmers but others might work too.)
The company has always made it as a typical moisturiser/lotion but then started hearing from RV/caravan/campers that it was keeping mosquitoes away.
If you'd like to use tap water without waiting, you can add ascorbic acid to water straight from the tap and it'll neutralize the chlorine and chloramine.
Ascorbic acid is a great, environmentally-safe reducing agent that readily donates electrons to these compounds. A 500–1000mg Vitamin C powder capsule will contain enough ascorbic acid to neutralize 5 gallons of even the worst city water with a good buffer to spare. What's left is harmless to most life, so you can throw your organic matter straight in.
Citric acid doesn't work. There are other effective reducing agents too, like Sodium thiosulfate and Sodium/Potassium metabisulfite that are pretty easy and affordable to get a hold of, but even if dosed perfectly I think there's a risk of the reduction byproducts remaining and causing toxicity to things like bacteria or other small organisms. If it's over dosed, it can easily kill larger organisms too.
Ascorbic acid is the only one I've found that I like to rely on. I use it for aquaria. Although my water is very clean and has virtually no chlorine in it, it does have trace chloramine, and I can't know if my municipality suddenly needs to treat the water more intensively. So, I always treat water I put in aquariums with around 250mg of ascorbic acid to be safe. The byproducts are safe for aquatic life, or in some cases even beneficial.
I don't entirely get this. If you have more spots with water, doesn't that just mean mosquitoes will lay more eggs? Which will then die, but +/- 0. How effective is this, actually.
Nope, you're effectively creating a population sink. A welcoming oasis that just so happens to be a poisoned well. The trick is to put these out and carefully monitor anything else that could be alternative breeding habitat (anything that can catch water)
The population of mosquitoes isn’t increased by your bucket (assuming it kills them all) but some of them that would have laid eggs in a location that doesn’t kill them are now laying them in a location that does.
So it’ll be a reduction. How much probably depends on their other options.
I've never attempted it so I don't have any first-hand judgements of its effectiveness. However, the logic in the article seems reasonable. A backyard which already has a high population of mosquitoes implies the area has existing spots with standing water where the eggs are being hatched. Adding controlled spots of water would concentrate those eggs there and kill them off before they have a chance to hatch more eggs and add to the population. Then, the existing adults die off naturally within weeks, and you should be left with a "mosquito free yard"
No, it means they'll lay the same amount of eggs (which is the max they can produce), but a significant portion of them will be in your trap rather than somewhere they can survive. Of those that aren't in the trap, they're still subject to the same death rate they would normally be subject to
There are multiple limiting factors on mosquito egg-laying - availability of water is just one of them. The energy/nutrition required to produces eggs (which comes from blood) is also a factor, plus time, etc.
I'm sure there is some extra egg-laying, but there are also eggs laid there that would have otherwise been in suitable water.
> The dunks contain an unhealthy—for the mosquito larvae—dose of the bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT. Don’t worry about your dog, Moonpie, or your cat, French Fry. They can drink straight from the bucket and be perfectly fine. Hey, it’s probably better than when they drink from your toilet, right?
Here I was under the impression that the water in the toilet is the same water as go into the taps, potable water, at least that's common here in Spain. Is it not the same in the US? Then both of them may have stagnant water or even "polluted" water in one way or another, but seems more or less the same.
Porcelain isn't zero percent porous. It's just the least porous material that can also support the weight of two people when fashioned into the shape of a toilet. There's a reason toilet cleaners still contain bleach.
author was just making a joke here. Yes it's all the same water in the US although some towns in actually have greywater distribution systems, mostly for irrigation and fire hydrants.
Large new buildings in the Bay Area will use recycled water for toilets as well as irrigation. There are signs above every toilet telling you the water in the toilet is not fit for drinking.
Ironically toilets are usually one of the cleanest locations in the US. There is no real concern about chemicals used, since no one should be drinking or eating from a toilet bowl. Generally speaking you wouldn't wash your plates with bleach
It is the same water but it's also fairly common for people to use harsh chemicals and toilet tablets to keep them clean and smelling fresh. Those would not be so good for your pet.
Many people with mosquito issues around here (Sweden) uses something like https://www.clasohlson.com/se/Mosquito-Magnet/p/31-7190 which burns propane to produce Co2 to lure in mosquitoes and then sucks them in with a fan towards a metal grid to zap them with electricity.
Non-poisonous and from what I've heard fairly effective. Not sure if these exists in the US?
I used one of these for two weeks. It killed many mosquitos, yes, but it killed far, far more non-mosquito pollinators which ultimately is not acceptable to me. If I didn't care about the other insects, I'd just spray my yard with poison and be done with it.
I thought it couldn't be that bad but wow, that's bad. The first font-family entry is Clas Ohlson Sans Web, so presumably a font developed for Clas Ohlson? Looking at samples online, J and to a lesser extend t are similarly hideous.
I guess it depends a lot on your situation, but for OP's method to be effective you need to out-compete other breeding grounds in not only your backyard but also X feet/meters away (whatever distance mosquitoes typically fly to "hunt").
If there's a nice shallow pond on the property line 100 feet from your porch (or water filled tires at the sloppy neighbour or whatever it might be), I seriously doubt the efficacy of the method in the article.
This thing would lure in any mosquitoes (and unfortunately other things, as per sibling comment) that fly in your backyard, wherever they come from.
For electricity: That also of course depends, but around here it's not uncommon to have an outlet on the outside of some garage or outbuilding or something. The product I linked have a 50 feet cord as well. The fan noise has not been noticeable at all when I've seen it.
Another excellent way to get rid of mosquitos is to attract their predators. Both hummingbirds and bats eat a surprisingly large number of mosquitos. Putting up hummingbird feeders and a bat house took care of it. I've seen only one mosquito in my yard this summer so far, even though I live next to a small wetland. Before the hummingbird feeders, we had lots of mosquitos.
I watched a hummingbird decimate a cloud of mosquitoes just a few weeks ago. It was fascinating; it hovered around them like an attack helicopter, and would dart in and out, then find a different angle, then dart in and out again. With every dart the cloud thinned until within a minute it was all gone.
Came here to say that a bat house is a self-perpetuating mosquito bucket of death that requires practically zero maintenance after install and doesn't introduce potentially invasive species of bacteria to the environment
I ended up building this entirely by accident. Last summer I wanted to have aquatic plants in my garden, so I made a small container pond.
As you can imagine it quickly got invaded by mosquito larvae. By the time I realized I was getting raided by mosquitos each night, much more than previous years.
After getting hold of the bacteria (not sure if it's completely allowed here, only Amazon would sell it to me) mosquitos are completely gone, in the pond and around.
I added 6 mosquitofish to my 110 gallon container pond two months ago. There are now nearly 100 in there, and the mosquito count in my back yard has definitely diminished.
Cool mosquitofish facts:
- An adult female can eat between 300-400 mosquito larvae in a single day.
- They're highly tolerant of low-oxygen and high-temperature water. They're hardy fish.
- They're native to North America, so pose little risk to getting into the water system, as they're already there.
- They're so effective at reducing mosquito populations, some local governments give them out for free.
I would be surprised if it isn't allowed anywhere. This bacteria has been known about and well studied for many decades and the cry toxin it produces has been bred into numerous crops starting 40 years ago.
I run a more risky method of this. I put two containers out and fill them with water. I check them every day, multiple times a day and when I see the squiggly larva in there, I dump it on a dry, sandy part of the yard. It bakes in the sun.
I have a dog and do a lot of yard work, so I honestly am in my backyard in the summer 5 to 10 times a day. When I have the traps out, I don't think I've gone more than 18 hours without checking them.
They are going to lay eggs somewhere, might as well give them a place to do it and then kill them before they mature. It isn't foolproof, I'm not sure I recommend it to others, but it has worked well for me for years.
I have a fancy kettle and warm water to the lowest heat it’s got (~160f) then pour it into an insulated mug with a spoon. Stir the water with the spoon then put the spoon on the bite. Works insanely well and I can usually treat all the bites we get in a night with one mug
These sort-of work, but not in the way they describe. It doesn't work to break down the mosquito "venom" through heat.
What's really happening is that the heat basically overloads (I don't recall the exact biology, but this is the gist) the sensory neurons that would be reporting about the itch. For a short time, until the neurons get unscrambled, the itching sensation is blocked. But it'll likely be back again if you're sensitive to bites.
Interesting. I am a native of Florida and happen to have a really horrendous backyard for mosquitoes. I've had county officials out to examine the area and can't find sources of water causing them.
I'd like to know how to empirically measure a population of mosquitoes to be able to evaluate the over time effectiveness of the treatments I've used as nothing seems to help.
Mosquito tubes with pesticide placed around the property, butane dispersers, zappers, citronella candles. I've tried everything! More than willing to try this.
That being said on an ecological level I am concerned about wiping out sub species non biter mosquitoes.
Great episode going over them but I'm curious as to whether science should step in and eliminate human menacing mosquitoes. Why? Well clearly we're trying to accomplish it ourselves and there's no selection for sub species here.
We always hear about mosquito science rumors down here in the land of UF inventing love bugs (myth). I wonder if it would be capable of impacting only a single species. (Neutering males with a generic modification ruining breeding efforts.)
I live in an area with a large number of mosquitoes. After a lot of trial-and-error, here's what I've found works.
Don't use a bug zapper. The zapper does kill things, but... the zapper also attracts bugs from far away into your area. If you have a large property, a zapper placed far away at the boundary can pull bugs away from the living area.
Mosquitoes are weak flyers; if you want to defend a static area, like a picnic table, a large fan can be used to keep a breeze up over the area and keep mosquitoes out.
With modern electronics, wouldn't it be possible to build a device that detects bugs using some type scanner (radar or whatever) and zaps them with a microwave laser? That seems like it could be 100x more efficient than this solution.
Buckets of bacterial muck sound a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than expensive high-tech devices that need to be powered and maintained. And buckets are unlikely to blind anyone if their safety system fails.
Interesting, I had the opposite idea, where the bacterial solution seems destined to give rise to resistant mosquitos and god knows what other unintended side effects.
The energy needed to kill a mosquito shouldn't be more than a joule or so, and regarding blinding, I suggested the microwave spectrum specifically to avoid that problem.
How quickly would the local population of mosquitos adapt to the MosquitoDunks, such that within a few generations, the only surviving ones would be the ones that are unaffected by the dunks? Or is that not a real concern?
I don’t know much biology, but is there a general principle where things that have a shorter reproductive cycle tend to “win” these sorts of arms races? I wonder if we will have to occasionally go out and find better copies of the bacteria, haha.
The arms race might not even be realistically winnable for the mosquito. Most of the time when we talk about resistance it’s to a single molecule or evolutionary adaptation. That mosquitos have not developed a resistance after decades of heavy use (we’ve been using Bt as a pesticide since the 1920s and its the most used pesticide today) implies that the Bacillus thuringiensis used in the dunks/bits is attacking the larvae with multiple different mechanisms of action.
When that happens, natural selection almost always fails to develop a resistance because a resistant organism needs to have a defense against every mechanism of action at the same time. The probability of two beneficial mutations lining up perfectly to create that resistant organism are just extremely unlikely. That’s the basis for modern oncology, which uses combination therapy to prevent tumors from growing resistant to any one drug.
Edit: yep I was right. Against mosquito larvae, Bt produces multiple Cry toxins that bind to specific protein receptors in the microvilli of midgut epithelial cells and Cyt toxins that directly interact with membrane lipids [1]. It’s a triple whammy because there’s six major toxins (Cry4Aa, Cry4Ba, Cry11Aa, Cyt1Aa, Cry10Aa, and Cyt2Ba), Cyt1Aa creates more binding sites for the Cry toxins to attack the cell, and Cyt1Aa itself has two mechanisms of action, one of which disassembles the cell membrane, leading to cell death. That is an incredibly difficult evolutionary hole for an organism to dig itself out of.
My neighbors and I have been using the dunks and mosquitos have been significantly reduced this year in Northern Virginia.
I'd prefer not to use the dunks as I'm uncertain they only impact mosquitos, but my insect population seems healthy. I saw a stag beetle two weeks ago! There are certainly fewer spiders though.
I checked on my bucket just now- I see three adult mosquitoes dead in the water (incidental? The dunk isn't targeting them). There is a spider web above the bucket with a trapped mosquito. I sat outside for a couple minutes and saw two adults flying around me. In prior years I'd be swamped by them even with bug spray; so this is a big improvement.
Thanks for the endorsement. I'm in NoVA as well, and this piqued my interest. I have a company that does spraying monthly, but it seems to have mixed results. The technician doesn't spray my herb and vegetable gardens (or my neighbors lawns), which makes suspect that these areas just replenish my area after the insecticide goes away.
One thing this won't help with are the chiggers which also populate my yard. But I'll happily deal with less mosquitos. I'll look forward to giving this a try.
Very interesting we’ve had infestations here (France) while I was living in the south, adding biogents moquitaire traps is also successful as a complement, April onwards to October.
But I love the name bucket of death. Tiger mosquitoes are such an annoyance
This is the same idea as the propane mosquito traps, that when run for a few weeks can eliminate a local population.
But the only places where they're useful is exurban, edge of the city kinds of places. Places where we've already disturbed the local ecosystem so much that the populations aren't kept in balance. Otherwise your other environments don't need them:
- a place where they're spraying so many pesticides that nothing survives, ie most cities
- a place where the bats, barn swallows and larval predators are so plentiful mosquitos are kept in check.
- a place where there are seasonal swarms of small bugs you simply cant put a dent in. people tend to visit these in-between seasons.
You can also try a simple fan blowing over the sitting areas, mosquitos (and other bugs) have difficulty flying in the breeze. I sometimes bring a small fan camping since the breeze is nice and I hate applying deet.
I love DEET. It is absolutely the perfect way to avoid mosquitos and ticks.
At home though, I use Thermacell. It's the only thing I have ever used that makes a measurable difference. Of course, you need to have one ever four or five feet unless the air is perfectly still but that's a small price.
Deet works on most things except deer flies. One bite is usually enough to itch for hours. They feed during the daytime.
"Their mouthparts include two pairs of cutting "blades" that lacerate skin and cause flow of blood out of the wound, which females lap up with a sponge-like mouthpart."
DEET is super effective, especially if you go to an outdoors store like REI and get the extremely concentrated 95% DEET they make for backpackers. Will it give me cancer on 20 years? Who knows. But it does work.
Deet works just fine and is safe for us, but Picaridin works just as well and is safe for dogs. Thermacells are putting a pyrethroid into vapor. Flat out its a neurological toxin, its just a matter of dose. I use one now and again but I can't help remember all the early onset parkinsons diagnoses, and how those cases are going up.
FWIW, I have found that icaridin-based repellents also work. It's dramatically less unpleasant than DEET!
(If you find that a fan works, that's even better! But I never really find these environmental interventions are good enough, they always get me at some point regardless)
Icaridin generally doesn't last as long as DEET though.
For fans, I have seen people make mosquito traps by attaching a bug net to a fan, sometimes combined with a CO2 generator as bait. I don't know how effective it is in practice. What we do sometimes is to put a fan under the table, it helps a little against low flying mosquitoes, definitely not as effective as DEET though.
Fans work great as long as you’re in the path of the fan. Mosquitoes are not very strong flyers. I use them with my hot tub because when I’m in there I’m not moving around.
The problem, of course, is that the path of a fan is huge and how many fans are you really going to have around?
I've heard of some other possible additions and improvements to this setup. One is to cover it with Saran wrap and poke or cut a small hole in the middle of it and let it drape down a little bit so that any mosquitoes that find their way in can't find them way out to lay eggs again elsewhere. Another option is to add some yeast and a little bit of sugar so that CO2 is emanated from the bucket particularly the little hole if you use the previous "improvement".
That’s too much organic material in the water and it will start competing with the BTI when it starts decaying (spoke with manufacturer/inventor’s son).
A couple improvements are to:
- Add bifenthrin to the sticks
- Use a black bucket for better attraction
- Consider spinosad vs BTI for longer lasting larvicide action
I have a big Obsidian file if anyone’s interested.
An AGO trap works just as well and you don't need to buy MosquitoDunks. While Bacillus thuringiensis has so far been considered safe, there is always the law of unintended consequences to worry about.
I'd love to find a way to encourage more dragonfly's to come hang out in my yard (middle of forest). I think of them as little organic mosquito-eating drones.
I recently moved ~70 miles from a relatively open plain to a hilly forest biome and the reduction in mosquito density is shocking to me. I suspect predation is the biggest factor given the climate is virtually identical.
I make a very strong point to not kill arachnids and similar creepers. I'm not a fan of gigantic spooky looking spiders and their homes, but I recognize they are much more efficient at killing my enemy than I am.
We moved into a new home recently that backs up to some woods and there is a stunning number of huge dragonflies in our backyard (and very few mosquitos).
It just seems like luck though, I wish there was a way to better support the dragonflies as they seem so helpful.
The best way to support dragonflies is to dig a small pond (2ft deep with shallow edges) and plant supporting flora in and around it.
Add aquatic plants like water lilies, cattails, or submerged plants like hornwort that provide egg laying sites and habitats for dragon fly nymphs. Around the pond plant native plants like tall grasses, sedges, and wildflowers - dragon flies use these as perches for hunting and resting. They especially like plants that grow 3-4 feet tall. You can also plant tall stakes, bamboo poles, or dead branches around the pound and other water features which the dragonflies use as perches for ambush hunting.
You’ll also want to maintain some algae and organic matter in the pond to provide food for the nymphs. It’ll take a year or two to establish themselves, but once they’re going a single dragonfly can eat up to a hundred mosquitos a day so they’re excellent pest control.
I put these into my yard a few weeks ago using 1G containers from the $1 store and a similar mosquito water treatment (dunks were sold out).
I’m not sure how to judge their effectiveness. I’m still bit. Is it down some significant percentage? I have no idea. I’m going to continue until I run out of the product. Jury is still out.
Is it possible to get the dunks/bits wet in some water then use a hose sprayer attachment to disperse the bt laced water around your yard to get the bt into soil and other places that are holding water (like spray anything along the side of one's house if they have a bunch of stuff that might be holding water sitting next to the house)?
You can just buy the Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis as a concentrate on Amazon [1] and use it in one of those mixing sprayers. It’s the most used pesticide in the world and considered nontoxic for the most part so it’s really easy to get in whatever form or concentration you need.
Mandatory if you have water troughs/tanks for animals such as goats or horses. Also a very good idea to encourage swallow nesting. Many an evening I watch a dozen or so swallows on our property dipping and diving in a sort or aerial mosquito feeding dance. Swallows are very cool btw. HTH, RF.
While swallows are definitely cool birbs, I would be very surprised if they had any noticeable effect on mosquito populations. There is even one study proposing that swallows attract more mosquitos!
Well, these are barn swallows. They eat up to 1,000 insects per day, and up to 100 mosquitos per day (link below). We have at least a dozen, so perhaps 1,200 mozzie per evening (I hope). I think barn swallows are the most populous bird species. Again they are pretty cool. We also have lots of bats, but they are harder to track. HTH, RF.
I hate cutting my grass and don't spray because I don't want to decimate the ecosystem in my yard (also, I'm lazy and it's hot out, so mowing sucks) but mosquitoes are a real problem.
Does this even cull the population down? If you're creating a perfect nesting area and then killing off the babies, you haven't really culled any of the active/dangerous mosquitos.
yes, the lifecycle of the mosquito is quick so the adults die off with age and the next generation dies in the bucket before they become adults. It doesn't help if you are at a camp site for two nights, but it does reduce population at your house.
I see-- but by providing a possible breeding ground, are you not inviting more adult/dangerous mosquitos into your home vicinity? It seems like this would be ideal if your neighbors did it, but you didn't.
Cool. I had an idea recently of creating breeding buckets that automatically flush the water onto the ground and refill every day or two. Mosquito breeding decoys without chemicals.
Some species of mosquitoes are able to survive their egg site drying out for quite some time. They go dormant and then hatch when they are rehydrated.
I believe this is quite dependent on the timing in the lifecycle though so maybe there's a design for this that works regardless, just by getting the periodicity right.
Edit: ah no, according to AI, the window before they become dessication-resistand is very short.
However, another idea (actually even simpler, no moving parts): a UV lamp that turns on for an hour every day would probably kill them pretty dead!
We have a wooded area in the back, with small shallow pools of water that appear and disappear depending on rainfall. I tried mosquito dunks for a few years and gave up. Felt it needed too many to cover the area.
I will try again with buckets. The HW store actually has green buckets so it won't even look like a dump! Thanks for the posting!
A bit of a tangent, but BT is also great for getting rid of tomato hornworms. The bacteria is harmless to humans, but fatal to the hornworms. A single application saved my tomato plants last year.
That said, the more I garden, the more I find the entire process a bit horrifying. Waging biological warfare on the critters is not what I thought I was signing up for.
Yep - it's not too difficult to coax a thing to grow. Life, uh, finds a way.
Gardening is often much more about preventing the stuff that you don't want to grow from growing, whether that's weeds, microbes, fungus, insects, critters, etc.
> Waging biological warfare on the critters is not what I thought I was signing up for.
Alternate framing: A grey-goo apocalypse caused nanobots to consume and occupy all the convenient parts of the planet, and after billions of years of assimilation and hacking, some of the survivors formed a mobile hivemind megafortress which can "garden" and feel conflicted about it. :p
In other words, it's biological warfare all the way down.
I don't have a yard of my own, but my friend has one. A few years ago, I told him to use this bucket method and throw away the water to kill the wiggles of the mosquitoes, but he didn't want to believe it or he was just reluctant to do the work
deer and horse flies are fundamentally different. a horse fly can be caught by a chemical attractant, think the "pop" traps. Which you can scale to a 5 gallon bucket no problem.
A deer fly goes after movement and the color blue, so your traps tend to be sticky traps, like a lowes bucket coated in tanglefoot. but you can't feed them to fish, chickens and they're a pain to clean.
I've been looking for someone to scale up some kind of fan trap for deer flies, like think a bigger version of the Katchy UV traps, but so far nobody has done anything. A fellow had a good example of using blue nitrile gloves blown up and coated in tanglefoot on a stick but while cheap, still messy.
Here's a thought -- there are instructions in various places for mosquito fan traps using a box or other sturdy fan plus mesh on one side.
Do that, but paint the fan (with blades) blue. If more movement is needed, you could probably do something pretty simple with a plastic plate painted blue and hung about a foot from the fan intake.
Cleanup isn't great, but it's better than sticky traps. Spray the mesh down with a 50:50 water:alcohol solution as needed to kill live flies in the trap before dumping.
I guess the same principle can be applied to various insects you don't like. Step 1: Figure out how they lay their eggs/create their spawn. Step 2: Build a contraption that is the ideal place for them to reproduce. Step 3: Use appropriate poison to kill them off.
Love the idea - I wonder what I can use in New Zealand though - these things can't be shipped to NZ (Note I'm not surprised by this fact, I didn't expect NZ to let in random loads of mosquito killing bacteria)
Wouldn't you be able to just set up buckets of water and then dump the water every few days before the mosquito larvae hatch? Is the point of the bacteria that you can set and forget about them?
The longer the water sits, the more suitable it is for the larvae and the more likely it is that the adults will lay eggs in it. If you refresh it frequently, it won't be as appealing.
We have pantry moths in the house (came in from the bird food)...is there anything similar for them? We use pheremone traps, but that's pretty late in the lifecycle and not 100%
Kill kill kill and discard grains. We have taken to freezing all grains that come in (flour, rice, bird seed) for at least a week before releasing it into the pantry.
Not that I know of. You can eliminate them from individual containers of food by freezing or by heating to fairly low temperatures (120°F?) that shouldn’t damage the food.
Food grade diatomaceous earth is somewhat safe, and you can sprinkle some around the corners of shelves.
I don't know if it's some anomaly of climate change but in recent years in this part of Central Europe there are less mosquitos and more common horse flies.
I have tried this a few times. If you live in the woods with lots of standing water, then it has literally no effect. I bought a giant supply of bacillus thurengensis pellets and put them in every body of standing water around the property weekly for a whole summer and still got annihilated by mosquitos. Now I spray, and while I hate pouring chemicals all over the property, it works fantastically well.
I could imagine it working alright if you live in the city or maybe a suburban area.
Some vector control programs give out mosquito fish, worth checking in. Where I live, mosquito fish are specifically discouraged in waters that may flow into natural waters because they can feed on native fish and amphibians. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any advice about what native fish I could put in the small, mucky, pond on my land. :( (Kitsap County, WA)
Problem with mosquito fish and other similar biocontrols is that they easily become invasive/noxious and disrupt the ecosystem in unintended ways. So if you plan to use them you need to be careful that they do not escape to nature, and in general it would be preferable to use native species instead
Not the first one this happened to. Article offers a suggestion:
> If you want to keep squirrels, chipmunks, and other small critters from getting trapped in the bucket, you also could put a piece of hardware cloth or chicken wire over the top of the bucket. To keep it in place, you can use zip ties.
That’d be Guinea fowl, but all you’ve done is created a new problem unless you have a large area for them to range and a high tolerance for bird guano.
I live near a swampy lake. I _thought_ these would not make a dent in mosquito populations. But all summer I've been able to sit outside without many bites, as long as I keep them rotated every month or so and stay away from the lake. 4 home depot buckets + a pack of dunks are magic.
For those asking - a bucket of sticks and leaves gets stagnat pretty quick. My guess is that it's so attractive that it just manages to attract most the mosquitos? I put one near the shore in two places, and two near the corners of my property. Our lake has just enough surface distrubance that the bucket might be better for them.
You might try mosquito fish as a biological control. They also are effective in abandoned swimming pools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish
The problem with this solution is that if they get into a local waterway and they're not native, they can absolutely destroy it. Despite the name they eat a lot more than just insects, and can cause any native insectivore fish to basically starve to death.
I wonder if the Bt bacteria were spreading beyond the buckets, affecting larvae elsewhere.
I think it's probably mostly that the bucket is more appealing place for offspring than a big open swamp with predators
Why rotate?
The comments saying that other sources of water need to be removed are spot on.
Another technique I've tried which works (observably) well is described in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BhV-o77RqQ
tl;dw: Get a big drum fan with a screen on the back, attached with small/powerful magnets. Mosquitos are such poor flyers that they get pulled against the screen and can't escape, and they pretty quickly desiccate and die. Most other flying insects don't get caught, although there is a bit of collateral (some moths and lacewings, unfortunately). Another benefit of the fan is that you can hang out in front of it and mosquitos mostly won't bother you there either.
I did this in our shared backyard space in Brooklyn and would catch hundreds/thousands of mosquitos per week. Despite that, there were still a ton of mosquitos in the area so it's best combined with other methods of control.
edit: better/updated video link
The fans in that video are probably 200-400W, running that nonstop seems pretty wasteful.
Fun to see Dan's videos :) (he made a lot about solar concentration too)
On a larger scale, there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI3HE7BcIBk&pp=ygUQbW9zcXVpd... about mosquito factories
Unclear from the video: do you need to use any sort of bait or lure to attract mosquitoes upstream of the fan?
I have a bug catcher that kind of looks like a Dyson bladeless fan but runs in reverse. Inside the ring, there's UV (?) LEDs to attract bugs. Once they fly in, the fan sucks them down into the base where there's a sticky paper. The base has a tight mesh around it so they are trapped if they somehow manage to not hit the sticky paper immediately. We use it for soil gnats but I've also seen some houseflies in there too.
1 reply →
I changed the video link to an updated version where he goes into much more detail. You don't need any lure (I didn't use any), but you can see in the updated link that he places the fans around where his dog sleeps and also uses a bottle of soda with the cap slightly unscrewed to slowly leak CO2.
In general though, if there are enough mosquitos around they will get caught in it without any additional effort.
Nope. They're so light that when they enter the airspace, they get sucked into the net (back) or blown away (front).
One question - how does this prevent mosquitos from breeding in other bits of standing water that I can't locate?
I have no idea where ours are coming from; I suspect they hatch somewhere, and then migrate to the shaded areas of my yard, which is where I typically get bit.
Adding a bucket will prevent some mosquitoes from laying eggs elsewhere, but not all, right? Or is the bucket so attractive to mosquitoes that they ignore other water sources?
Our pest control put in a bucket called In2Care that has a little net with some powder suspended above the water - mosquito lands on the net, gets the powder on 'em, carries it to the next site and that site gets neutralized. They're designed for commercial campuses but for ~$200/yr it's well worth it for residential also.
They do take a while to take effect, and they do take maintenance, but my experience so far is that they're super effective.
My intuition is that you are correct: the bucket doesn't eliminate all breeding grounds. It's a numbers game: you want to lower the population as much as possible. If you reduce the population enough, nature has the opportunity to handle the rest, since mosquito reproduction is also a numbers game: mates have to locate one another. This also frustratingly means it won't be an instant solution even if it eventually works. It takes a few generations to realize the benefits of the lowered population.
Keep in mind that many mosquito species don't fly far too far from where they are born (in particular the very annoying tiger mosquito does'nt fly more than 100m) so treating your own garden might somewhat be effective (depending of housing density where you live).
treating your own garden means not leaving stagnant waters (including in water pots etc). then you can consider trap. also try to convince your close neighbours to do the same.
After checking the obvious like old tires or stagnant ditches or tire tracks, the more hidden breeding sites include house gutters, French drains (under the gravel), buried yard drains, and garage floor drains.
The general rule is that mosquitos need a pool of water the size of a bottle cap, and it needs to be there for at least a week. Good luck, and good hunting.
I didn’t even think of my rain gutters. I haven’t cleaned them this year. Thanks
9 replies →
Water suitable for mosquito breeding in nature is probably three million times more common than the man-made.
3 replies →
beware the undulated lids of garbage bins standing outside your house ... or an uncapped recycling bin
They don't. The basic idea is to put many of them up, so the chances of them using one instead of a puddle, etc are greater. I have about 20 smaller ovitraps up around my property.
You can also get traps that target the mature biting mosquitoes. Defense in depth!
Check out Biogents brand. They use attractants like urea and CO2 to draw the mosquitoes to the trap instead of your body. You'd put these closer to the areas you inhabit.
> One question - how does this prevent mosquitos from breeding in other bits of standing water that I can't locate?
It cannot and that is not its purpose. Practically you should be able to locate any other breeding grounds by mere observation and then you have to eliminate them one by one until the mosquitos are left with the ones you set up.
The key to this working is ensuring that the buckets are the only standing water around. If even 10% of the females decide to use your clogged gutter, broken water fountain, or forgotten livestock waterer instead of your buckets, you will still have a mosquito problem.
In other words, the real tip is to eliminate standing water.
This matches my experience. Building these buckets did nothing, and maybe made it worse. Putting 1/10th as much effort into eliminating standing water is what actually fixed my problem.
Remember, mosquitos can breed in a puddle the size of a bottle cap!
> Building these buckets did nothing, and maybe made it worse.
How could it have possibly made it worse? Even if it only prevented a small fraction of the mosquito population from reproducing it'd still be helping.
1 reply →
> Remember, mosquitos can breed in a puddle the size of a bottle cap!
There's been so much rain these past months that my entire yard has been filled with puddles. There's only so much you can do to eliminate standing water when it's everywhere.
I’d still take 10% as many mosquitoes over 100%.
Yeah, I tried using the dunks as-is when we first moved to the semi-woods and realized how Sisepheyan the task was. That said, this bucket approach is interesting.
[flagged]
Every time I have read science guys about things that you can do to kill mosquitos there is an analogy to putting a drain in the ocean. You can kill mosquitos at a fantastic rate but, unless you are also killing them in all your neighbor's yards for a mile around, they are just going to keep coming as fast as they die.
Mosquitos don't fly very fast or very far, and they breed extremely fast, so if you have nearby puddles you get a "local high density" zone. The inflow is so large that it never settles down to the expected steady state with uniform density.
It's the same reason you have a high density of sports fans when you stand near the exit of a stadium after a game. The people (mosquitos) are streaming out of the stadium (standing water) so fast that there's a local high-density zone.
I literally live in a swamp, so I reasoned "how much could one tire hurt?" Oh boy was I wrong! Eliminating that one single mosquito breeding site near the house made an enormous difference on the local mosquito density.
Bingo. We did these buckets, were very diligent about it. They appeared to work (at least in terms of attracting Mosquitos, which they're meant to do) but had no real effect generally. House next door is a rental, with a rotating cast of 20-somethings that do not keep up the yard and its filled with nice little habitats for Mosquitos.
One thing that an HOA might actually be good for - I would love to see what happens if our entire neighborhood did this.
I would love to live in a neighborhood full of meadow style gardens, where native plants are allowed to flower and feed bees, with bug habitats instead of neatly cut astroturf looking golf green lawns chock full of pesticides.
I can't understand the people that think the artificial look holds any beauty whatsoever.
9 replies →
You might have some success with talking to them, or even dropping a leaflet or a print out in their mailbox explaining the problem and encouraging them to check their yard for breeding grounds. A lot of folks (especially young ones) just don't think about that kind of thing, but very few people actually like mosquitos, so a polite reminder every couple years or when someone new moves in might do some good.
2 replies →
> One thing that an HOA might actually be good for
I've gotten nothing but benefits from living in neighborhoods with HOAs. Basic stuff like funding for landscapers to keep up the shared grassy areas along the streets, to plowing the access roads in winter time. But the main benefit has always been that it provides a legal mechanism to force everyone to maintain their yards and property. No need to drop passive-aggressive notes in a mailbox about people parking their cars on their lawns.
10/10 highly recommend
edit: apparently you guys don't like HOAs haha. Well I love them. Keeps the neighborhood from looking like a dump.
62 replies →
Mosquitos don't actually like to fly that far for their meal / breeding grounds, and yes you should absolutely be buying these for your neighbors. Make a little gift basket
I agree in the sense that if everyone did their part, the outcome would be meaningful.
This is not to say that traps don’t make your house more livable. Once, I lived in a house connected to a forest in Brazil—no real neighbors, and a shitload of mosquitoes.
I did buy some fancy traps with UV lights and fans, and oh boy, I killed a shitload of them. Not to say I fully solved the mosquito problem, but I significantly reduced the bites. My wife is allergic to them, so she’s a great sensor—if there’s even one mosquito in the room, she knows.
The UV light traps attract all sorts of insects that aren't female mosquitos looking for a blood meal. They can catch mosquitos too, but probably not super well. A trap focusing on the scents they follow from humans would do more with less collateral damage.
1 reply →
I've been using a 20 lb CO2 tank to bait mosquitos into an enclosure with a fan which provides gentle suction, with a fair amount of success. This method does reduce numbers from areas that are not under your control, but the "dunks" are probably still the cheapest easiest treatment for local buggers
This. My old neighbor had a broken hot tub that would breed thousands of mosquitoes. Buying the fancy, $200, german made trap was satisfying because of how many it caught but it didn't keep you from being bit.
I have my doubts about this. I had my back/front yard sprayed for mosquitos and the population seems to have dropped by 90-95% while bbqing out back.
Fogging works for sure, and there’s lots of data to back it up, the issue is not efficacy but toxicity and environmental impact.
My closest neighbor is about 500 feet away
Rookie numbers!
[dead]
Currently I've been using these to deal with fungus gnats in my indoor plants; they are quite effective, just put one in my watering can, keep the watering can full so it can steep, and water as normal. It kills the larvae in the same way and after about a month I had no more fungus gnat problem (after trying many other things with no success) I do wonder about the eventual mosquito adaption to this if it is employed on a large scale though.
This bacterial strain was discovered in 1976, but has been in the environment for a long time. Resistance should have already emerged?
"As a toxic mechanism, cry proteins bind to specific receptors on the membranes of mid-gut (epithelial) cells of the targeted pests, resulting in their rupture. Other organisms (including humans, other animals and non-targeted insects) that lack the appropriate receptors in their gut cannot be affected by the cry protein, and therefore are not affected by Bt."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis
Edit: "Spores and crystalline insecticidal proteins produced by B. thuringiensis have been used to control insect pests since the 1920s and are often applied as liquid sprays and donut pellets."
It does exist in nature all over, but it generally isn't in such a high concentration. Its like releasing 1,000 goats in your backyard. Even if your backyard could support a few goats, it will certainly be destroyed by 1,000 of them.
5 replies →
If you keep reading that Wikipedia article you will get to citation 47 which directly references Bt resistance in the European corn borer.
Evolution is complex and 100 years is not very long. But eventually some effect is likely.
Interesting. I have fungus gnat problems as well. I am going to give this a try, thanks for the tip!
Note that instead of the mosquito dunks you can also buy "mosquito bits" which are the same thing in granular form. Last time I bought one they were cheaper per unit cost and they easier to use because you don't have to break them up.
For some reason mosquito dunks can be shipped to California but not mosquito bits, according to Amazon. They look to be the same thing to me. Anyone know the reason? Maybe it is an Amazon data error?
I've seen several cases like this on Amazon, where products are not available to ship to California but should be. In one case I even spoke to the manufacturer who said they got it fixed, then weeks later it was unavailable again.
There's clearly something going on where their systems are being extra cautious on what can and cannot be shipped to CA.
I tried the water based approach before and didn't work, but this may be a good one. What does work for me is a CO2 based trap. I have 4 neighbors on the street using them now. Mosquitos follow CO2 to find their targets, and get sucked into the bucket. Its kind of expensive (upfront cost of about $200 then about $60 in CO2 per summer, but I have a large bag full of mosquitos regularly so i know it works. And I can tell when the CO2 runs out because mosquiotos are back.
No affiliation: https://us.biogents.com/
CO2 seems to be extremely effective in general, but what I really want is for someone to create a commercial version of something I saw DIY'd on Reddit. They used safely-contained smoldering coals placed behind a high-speed outdoor fan, with mosquito netting secured loosely (but with no gaps) to the front of the fan.
The fan intakes CO2 from the coals... and blows it out into the neighborhood (I think he claimed it was detectable at 60 or 80 feet?) to essentially advertise. When mosquitos approach, they're sucked into the fan intake, and can't get out past the blades and netting. Most are dead by morning, and the rest you spray down before removal. IIRC he said he only needed to do it one night every few weeks to keep the population unnoticeable, and he'd wake up to thousands in the netting the next morning.
I'm sketched-out by the CO2 mechanism, so I've never tried it, but figuring out an extremely slow release mechanism from a small tank seems doable. Maybe one day I'll get around to tinkering with it. My neighborhood started spraying, so it hasn't been bad enough to put much effort into.
I don't have a mosquito trapping solution, but wanted to also offer help to anyone harassed by mosquitos: Despite being a magnet for mosquitos, I've found a coconut-based moisturiser to be more effective than even "tropical-strength" repellants. I used to use various repellants and still get bitten, but this moisturiser is hilariously effective. (Brand is Palmers but others might work too.)
The company has always made it as a typical moisturiser/lotion but then started hearing from RV/caravan/campers that it was keeping mosquitoes away.
If you'd like to use tap water without waiting, you can add ascorbic acid to water straight from the tap and it'll neutralize the chlorine and chloramine.
Ascorbic acid is a great, environmentally-safe reducing agent that readily donates electrons to these compounds. A 500–1000mg Vitamin C powder capsule will contain enough ascorbic acid to neutralize 5 gallons of even the worst city water with a good buffer to spare. What's left is harmless to most life, so you can throw your organic matter straight in.
Interesting, would any other cheap readily available acid (like citric) work too?
Citric acid doesn't work. There are other effective reducing agents too, like Sodium thiosulfate and Sodium/Potassium metabisulfite that are pretty easy and affordable to get a hold of, but even if dosed perfectly I think there's a risk of the reduction byproducts remaining and causing toxicity to things like bacteria or other small organisms. If it's over dosed, it can easily kill larger organisms too.
Ascorbic acid is the only one I've found that I like to rely on. I use it for aquaria. Although my water is very clean and has virtually no chlorine in it, it does have trace chloramine, and I can't know if my municipality suddenly needs to treat the water more intensively. So, I always treat water I put in aquariums with around 250mg of ascorbic acid to be safe. The byproducts are safe for aquatic life, or in some cases even beneficial.
1 reply →
Prevents scurvy too!
I don't entirely get this. If you have more spots with water, doesn't that just mean mosquitoes will lay more eggs? Which will then die, but +/- 0. How effective is this, actually.
Nope, you're effectively creating a population sink. A welcoming oasis that just so happens to be a poisoned well. The trick is to put these out and carefully monitor anything else that could be alternative breeding habitat (anything that can catch water)
The population of mosquitoes isn’t increased by your bucket (assuming it kills them all) but some of them that would have laid eggs in a location that doesn’t kill them are now laying them in a location that does.
So it’ll be a reduction. How much probably depends on their other options.
I've never attempted it so I don't have any first-hand judgements of its effectiveness. However, the logic in the article seems reasonable. A backyard which already has a high population of mosquitoes implies the area has existing spots with standing water where the eggs are being hatched. Adding controlled spots of water would concentrate those eggs there and kill them off before they have a chance to hatch more eggs and add to the population. Then, the existing adults die off naturally within weeks, and you should be left with a "mosquito free yard"
No, it means they'll lay the same amount of eggs (which is the max they can produce), but a significant portion of them will be in your trap rather than somewhere they can survive. Of those that aren't in the trap, they're still subject to the same death rate they would normally be subject to
There are multiple limiting factors on mosquito egg-laying - availability of water is just one of them. The energy/nutrition required to produces eggs (which comes from blood) is also a factor, plus time, etc.
I'm sure there is some extra egg-laying, but there are also eggs laid there that would have otherwise been in suitable water.
I put Mosquito dunks in the buckets in my yard which kills the larvae, it has worked so far, no standing water plus dunks where water might pool.
If there are more mosquitoes than egg-laying spots, then yes. If there are more egg-laying spots than mosquitoes, then no.
> The dunks contain an unhealthy—for the mosquito larvae—dose of the bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT. Don’t worry about your dog, Moonpie, or your cat, French Fry. They can drink straight from the bucket and be perfectly fine. Hey, it’s probably better than when they drink from your toilet, right?
Here I was under the impression that the water in the toilet is the same water as go into the taps, potable water, at least that's common here in Spain. Is it not the same in the US? Then both of them may have stagnant water or even "polluted" water in one way or another, but seems more or less the same.
It's not the _water_ in the toilet that's gross to drink...
People have probably not defecated in your fresh water pipes. Your toilet bowl can’t claim the same.
It's the same in the US. I think the author probably just meant that slightly buggy "pond" water is no worse than toiler water for a pet.
(Americans also like to put all kinds of chemical pucks/cleaner devices in our toilets, so maybe the author is referring to that?)
Porcelain isn't zero percent porous. It's just the least porous material that can also support the weight of two people when fashioned into the shape of a toilet. There's a reason toilet cleaners still contain bleach.
Two people - what are people doing on their toilet? (Or do you just mean 2x normal weight, as a safety factor?)
1 reply →
author was just making a joke here. Yes it's all the same water in the US although some towns in actually have greywater distribution systems, mostly for irrigation and fire hydrants.
Large new buildings in the Bay Area will use recycled water for toilets as well as irrigation. There are signs above every toilet telling you the water in the toilet is not fit for drinking.
Ironically toilets are usually one of the cleanest locations in the US. There is no real concern about chemicals used, since no one should be drinking or eating from a toilet bowl. Generally speaking you wouldn't wash your plates with bleach
Would you drink out of your toilet?
You mean like from a toilet?
It is the same water but it's also fairly common for people to use harsh chemicals and toilet tablets to keep them clean and smelling fresh. Those would not be so good for your pet.
It's also fairly common for people to urinate and defecate in them.
In the US we shit in our toilets.
Many people with mosquito issues around here (Sweden) uses something like https://www.clasohlson.com/se/Mosquito-Magnet/p/31-7190 which burns propane to produce Co2 to lure in mosquitoes and then sucks them in with a fan towards a metal grid to zap them with electricity.
Non-poisonous and from what I've heard fairly effective. Not sure if these exists in the US?
I used one of these for two weeks. It killed many mosquitos, yes, but it killed far, far more non-mosquito pollinators which ultimately is not acceptable to me. If I didn't care about the other insects, I'd just spray my yard with poison and be done with it.
As always, YMMV
I tried one of these once. It was annoying, seemed kind of dangerous, and wasn't especially effective. This is much better:
https://us-shop.biogents.com/products/bg-mosquitaire-co2
Admittedly, it is more annoying to refill.
That being said, depending on your mosquito species, the Biogents chemical attractant may be even more effective than CO2.
We have one with a fan and a coated UV light that does similar, it just sucks them in till they dehydrate/starve
https://www.costco.com/dynatrap-1-acre-insect-and-mosquito-t...
catches moths as well, so it's not as eco friendly.
Does it actually attract mosquitoes? I didn't think they'd be attracted to UV light.
1 reply →
I'm going off-topic, but what's up with that font with the ugly square-bottomed lower-case g's? I've been seeing it everywhere. It's not good.
I thought it couldn't be that bad but wow, that's bad. The first font-family entry is Clas Ohlson Sans Web, so presumably a font developed for Clas Ohlson? Looking at samples online, J and to a lesser extend t are similarly hideous.
1 reply →
Very cool where can I get on?
I have seen a similar thing at https://us.biogents.com/
Haven't used it so I can't comment on its effectiveness
2 replies →
How is that better than what the article describes? You need gas, electricity (outdoors!) and get constant fan noise.
I guess it depends a lot on your situation, but for OP's method to be effective you need to out-compete other breeding grounds in not only your backyard but also X feet/meters away (whatever distance mosquitoes typically fly to "hunt").
If there's a nice shallow pond on the property line 100 feet from your porch (or water filled tires at the sloppy neighbour or whatever it might be), I seriously doubt the efficacy of the method in the article.
This thing would lure in any mosquitoes (and unfortunately other things, as per sibling comment) that fly in your backyard, wherever they come from.
For electricity: That also of course depends, but around here it's not uncommon to have an outlet on the outside of some garage or outbuilding or something. The product I linked have a 50 feet cord as well. The fan noise has not been noticeable at all when I've seen it.
Another excellent way to get rid of mosquitos is to attract their predators. Both hummingbirds and bats eat a surprisingly large number of mosquitos. Putting up hummingbird feeders and a bat house took care of it. I've seen only one mosquito in my yard this summer so far, even though I live next to a small wetland. Before the hummingbird feeders, we had lots of mosquitos.
I watched a hummingbird decimate a cloud of mosquitoes just a few weeks ago. It was fascinating; it hovered around them like an attack helicopter, and would dart in and out, then find a different angle, then dart in and out again. With every dart the cloud thinned until within a minute it was all gone.
Came here to say that a bat house is a self-perpetuating mosquito bucket of death that requires practically zero maintenance after install and doesn't introduce potentially invasive species of bacteria to the environment
I ended up building this entirely by accident. Last summer I wanted to have aquatic plants in my garden, so I made a small container pond.
As you can imagine it quickly got invaded by mosquito larvae. By the time I realized I was getting raided by mosquitos each night, much more than previous years.
After getting hold of the bacteria (not sure if it's completely allowed here, only Amazon would sell it to me) mosquitos are completely gone, in the pond and around.
Other natural solution is having either fish, ducks, dragonflies, frogs, toads or other of the many things feeding on mosquito or their larvae
You can also add some small fish — many species of fish think that mosquito larvae and pupae are delicious.
I added 6 mosquitofish to my 110 gallon container pond two months ago. There are now nearly 100 in there, and the mosquito count in my back yard has definitely diminished.
Cool mosquitofish facts:
- An adult female can eat between 300-400 mosquito larvae in a single day.
- They're highly tolerant of low-oxygen and high-temperature water. They're hardy fish.
- They're native to North America, so pose little risk to getting into the water system, as they're already there.
- They're so effective at reducing mosquito populations, some local governments give them out for free.
src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish
I would be surprised if it isn't allowed anywhere. This bacteria has been known about and well studied for many decades and the cry toxin it produces has been bred into numerous crops starting 40 years ago.
I run a more risky method of this. I put two containers out and fill them with water. I check them every day, multiple times a day and when I see the squiggly larva in there, I dump it on a dry, sandy part of the yard. It bakes in the sun.
I have a dog and do a lot of yard work, so I honestly am in my backyard in the summer 5 to 10 times a day. When I have the traps out, I don't think I've gone more than 18 hours without checking them.
They are going to lay eggs somewhere, might as well give them a place to do it and then kill them before they mature. It isn't foolproof, I'm not sure I recommend it to others, but it has worked well for me for years.
Related, I've found this to be the most effective gadget to stop the itch of a mosquito bite: https://www.amazon.com/Vibis-Rechargeable-Mosquito-Chemical-... (Source: Floridian who has tried everything)
I have a fancy kettle and warm water to the lowest heat it’s got (~160f) then pour it into an insulated mug with a spoon. Stir the water with the spoon then put the spoon on the bite. Works insanely well and I can usually treat all the bites we get in a night with one mug
These sort-of work, but not in the way they describe. It doesn't work to break down the mosquito "venom" through heat.
What's really happening is that the heat basically overloads (I don't recall the exact biology, but this is the gist) the sensory neurons that would be reporting about the itch. For a short time, until the neurons get unscrambled, the itching sensation is blocked. But it'll likely be back again if you're sensitive to bites.
Do you have a source for this?
1 reply →
Thinly-veiled SPAM for the trademarked products Mosquito Bits and Mosquito Dunks, which ARE excellent products.
But skip the bucket - just buy a bag of Mosquito Bits. Scatter them whereever water settles. Once the organism is established nature takes its course.
I used Mosquito Bits for years to minimize mosquitoes in our condominium project. After two years of doing this, mosquitoes were almost absent.
The fan trap (e.g. https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Get-Rid-Of-Mosquitoes-w...) is another low-tech solution that is quite effective.
The one thing this needs to really scale up the murder is a CO2 source behind the fan to attract mosquitoes actively.
The fan works by concentrating CO2, heat, odor etc in front on the fan/screen.
Interesting. I am a native of Florida and happen to have a really horrendous backyard for mosquitoes. I've had county officials out to examine the area and can't find sources of water causing them.
I'd like to know how to empirically measure a population of mosquitoes to be able to evaluate the over time effectiveness of the treatments I've used as nothing seems to help.
Mosquito tubes with pesticide placed around the property, butane dispersers, zappers, citronella candles. I've tried everything! More than willing to try this.
That being said on an ecological level I am concerned about wiping out sub species non biter mosquitoes.
https://www.alieward.com/ologies/culicidology
Great episode going over them but I'm curious as to whether science should step in and eliminate human menacing mosquitoes. Why? Well clearly we're trying to accomplish it ourselves and there's no selection for sub species here.
We always hear about mosquito science rumors down here in the land of UF inventing love bugs (myth). I wonder if it would be capable of impacting only a single species. (Neutering males with a generic modification ruining breeding efforts.)
I live in an area with a large number of mosquitoes. After a lot of trial-and-error, here's what I've found works.
Don't use a bug zapper. The zapper does kill things, but... the zapper also attracts bugs from far away into your area. If you have a large property, a zapper placed far away at the boundary can pull bugs away from the living area.
You can pay a company to come spray your yard frequently, but it gets expensive over time. I bought a gas-powered fogger (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0746S92WW) and the chemicals: Insecticide and Insect Growth Regulator (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RW197XG and https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CT9IDO)
Spray everything once a week initially, then you can try dropping down to every other week. Very few mosquitoes remain.
Further, look into repellents: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bug-repellen...
Mosquitoes are weak flyers; if you want to defend a static area, like a picnic table, a large fan can be used to keep a breeze up over the area and keep mosquitoes out.
With modern electronics, wouldn't it be possible to build a device that detects bugs using some type scanner (radar or whatever) and zaps them with a microwave laser? That seems like it could be 100x more efficient than this solution.
"Laser-wielding device is like an anti-aircraft system for mosquitoes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478171
According to the Indiegogo campaign they are expecting to retail these for US$900.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/worlds-first-portable-mos...
Buckets of bacterial muck sound a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than expensive high-tech devices that need to be powered and maintained. And buckets are unlikely to blind anyone if their safety system fails.
Interesting, I had the opposite idea, where the bacterial solution seems destined to give rise to resistant mosquitos and god knows what other unintended side effects.
The energy needed to kill a mosquito shouldn't be more than a joule or so, and regarding blinding, I suggested the microwave spectrum specifically to avoid that problem.
The Gates foundation funded research into just such a device.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
People have made prototypes but I think there may be hazzard if it gets your retina rather than a bug.
There was an interesting idea the other day for a mini drone that bashes them with its prop - top comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702833
How quickly would the local population of mosquitos adapt to the MosquitoDunks, such that within a few generations, the only surviving ones would be the ones that are unaffected by the dunks? Or is that not a real concern?
I wonder…
I don’t know much biology, but is there a general principle where things that have a shorter reproductive cycle tend to “win” these sorts of arms races? I wonder if we will have to occasionally go out and find better copies of the bacteria, haha.
The arms race might not even be realistically winnable for the mosquito. Most of the time when we talk about resistance it’s to a single molecule or evolutionary adaptation. That mosquitos have not developed a resistance after decades of heavy use (we’ve been using Bt as a pesticide since the 1920s and its the most used pesticide today) implies that the Bacillus thuringiensis used in the dunks/bits is attacking the larvae with multiple different mechanisms of action.
When that happens, natural selection almost always fails to develop a resistance because a resistant organism needs to have a defense against every mechanism of action at the same time. The probability of two beneficial mutations lining up perfectly to create that resistant organism are just extremely unlikely. That’s the basis for modern oncology, which uses combination therapy to prevent tumors from growing resistant to any one drug.
Edit: yep I was right. Against mosquito larvae, Bt produces multiple Cry toxins that bind to specific protein receptors in the microvilli of midgut epithelial cells and Cyt toxins that directly interact with membrane lipids [1]. It’s a triple whammy because there’s six major toxins (Cry4Aa, Cry4Ba, Cry11Aa, Cyt1Aa, Cry10Aa, and Cyt2Ba), Cyt1Aa creates more binding sites for the Cry toxins to attack the cell, and Cyt1Aa itself has two mechanisms of action, one of which disassembles the cell membrane, leading to cell death. That is an incredibly difficult evolutionary hole for an organism to dig itself out of.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0505494102
I presume so. Here's a great example of it with bacteria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDa4-nSc7J8
My neighbors and I have been using the dunks and mosquitos have been significantly reduced this year in Northern Virginia.
I'd prefer not to use the dunks as I'm uncertain they only impact mosquitos, but my insect population seems healthy. I saw a stag beetle two weeks ago! There are certainly fewer spiders though.
I checked on my bucket just now- I see three adult mosquitoes dead in the water (incidental? The dunk isn't targeting them). There is a spider web above the bucket with a trapped mosquito. I sat outside for a couple minutes and saw two adults flying around me. In prior years I'd be swamped by them even with bug spray; so this is a big improvement.
Thanks for the endorsement. I'm in NoVA as well, and this piqued my interest. I have a company that does spraying monthly, but it seems to have mixed results. The technician doesn't spray my herb and vegetable gardens (or my neighbors lawns), which makes suspect that these areas just replenish my area after the insecticide goes away.
One thing this won't help with are the chiggers which also populate my yard. But I'll happily deal with less mosquitos. I'll look forward to giving this a try.
Very interesting we’ve had infestations here (France) while I was living in the south, adding biogents moquitaire traps is also successful as a complement, April onwards to October. But I love the name bucket of death. Tiger mosquitoes are such an annoyance
This is the same idea as the propane mosquito traps, that when run for a few weeks can eliminate a local population.
But the only places where they're useful is exurban, edge of the city kinds of places. Places where we've already disturbed the local ecosystem so much that the populations aren't kept in balance. Otherwise your other environments don't need them:
- a place where they're spraying so many pesticides that nothing survives, ie most cities
- a place where the bats, barn swallows and larval predators are so plentiful mosquitos are kept in check.
- a place where there are seasonal swarms of small bugs you simply cant put a dent in. people tend to visit these in-between seasons.
You can also try a simple fan blowing over the sitting areas, mosquitos (and other bugs) have difficulty flying in the breeze. I sometimes bring a small fan camping since the breeze is nice and I hate applying deet.
I love DEET. It is absolutely the perfect way to avoid mosquitos and ticks.
At home though, I use Thermacell. It's the only thing I have ever used that makes a measurable difference. Of course, you need to have one ever four or five feet unless the air is perfectly still but that's a small price.
Deet works on most things except deer flies. One bite is usually enough to itch for hours. They feed during the daytime.
"Their mouthparts include two pairs of cutting "blades" that lacerate skin and cause flow of blood out of the wound, which females lap up with a sponge-like mouthpart."
https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/publichealth/insects/taban...
Having lived in places were mosquitos thrive, I 100% agree with you.
I keep bottles and sachets of OFF's DEEP WOODS DEET fueled repellant in my car, book bags, its a must-have.
DEET is super effective, especially if you go to an outdoors store like REI and get the extremely concentrated 95% DEET they make for backpackers. Will it give me cancer on 20 years? Who knows. But it does work.
Deet works just fine and is safe for us, but Picaridin works just as well and is safe for dogs. Thermacells are putting a pyrethroid into vapor. Flat out its a neurological toxin, its just a matter of dose. I use one now and again but I can't help remember all the early onset parkinsons diagnoses, and how those cases are going up.
FWIW, I have found that icaridin-based repellents also work. It's dramatically less unpleasant than DEET!
(If you find that a fan works, that's even better! But I never really find these environmental interventions are good enough, they always get me at some point regardless)
Icaridin generally doesn't last as long as DEET though.
For fans, I have seen people make mosquito traps by attaching a bug net to a fan, sometimes combined with a CO2 generator as bait. I don't know how effective it is in practice. What we do sometimes is to put a fan under the table, it helps a little against low flying mosquitoes, definitely not as effective as DEET though.
Fans work great as long as you’re in the path of the fan. Mosquitoes are not very strong flyers. I use them with my hot tub because when I’m in there I’m not moving around.
The problem, of course, is that the path of a fan is huge and how many fans are you really going to have around?
1 reply →
I've heard of some other possible additions and improvements to this setup. One is to cover it with Saran wrap and poke or cut a small hole in the middle of it and let it drape down a little bit so that any mosquitoes that find their way in can't find them way out to lay eggs again elsewhere. Another option is to add some yeast and a little bit of sugar so that CO2 is emanated from the bucket particularly the little hole if you use the previous "improvement".
That’s too much organic material in the water and it will start competing with the BTI when it starts decaying (spoke with manufacturer/inventor’s son).
A couple improvements are to: - Add bifenthrin to the sticks - Use a black bucket for better attraction - Consider spinosad vs BTI for longer lasting larvicide action
I have a big Obsidian file if anyone’s interested.
An AGO trap works just as well and you don't need to buy MosquitoDunks. While Bacillus thuringiensis has so far been considered safe, there is always the law of unintended consequences to worry about.
https://catchmasterpro.com/products/ovi-catch-ago-mosquito-t...
I'd love to find a way to encourage more dragonfly's to come hang out in my yard (middle of forest). I think of them as little organic mosquito-eating drones.
I recently moved ~70 miles from a relatively open plain to a hilly forest biome and the reduction in mosquito density is shocking to me. I suspect predation is the biggest factor given the climate is virtually identical.
I make a very strong point to not kill arachnids and similar creepers. I'm not a fan of gigantic spooky looking spiders and their homes, but I recognize they are much more efficient at killing my enemy than I am.
We moved into a new home recently that backs up to some woods and there is a stunning number of huge dragonflies in our backyard (and very few mosquitos).
It just seems like luck though, I wish there was a way to better support the dragonflies as they seem so helpful.
The best way to support dragonflies is to dig a small pond (2ft deep with shallow edges) and plant supporting flora in and around it.
Add aquatic plants like water lilies, cattails, or submerged plants like hornwort that provide egg laying sites and habitats for dragon fly nymphs. Around the pond plant native plants like tall grasses, sedges, and wildflowers - dragon flies use these as perches for hunting and resting. They especially like plants that grow 3-4 feet tall. You can also plant tall stakes, bamboo poles, or dead branches around the pound and other water features which the dragonflies use as perches for ambush hunting.
You’ll also want to maintain some algae and organic matter in the pond to provide food for the nymphs. It’ll take a year or two to establish themselves, but once they’re going a single dragonfly can eat up to a hundred mosquitos a day so they’re excellent pest control.
I definitely notice an increase in local (my backyard) mosquito activity if I accidentally leave standing water around. So I can see this working.
I put these into my yard a few weeks ago using 1G containers from the $1 store and a similar mosquito water treatment (dunks were sold out).
I’m not sure how to judge their effectiveness. I’m still bit. Is it down some significant percentage? I have no idea. I’m going to continue until I run out of the product. Jury is still out.
These are a form of ovitrap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovitrap
There are many forms that require even less investment. I made some out of some plastic water bottles and a few pairs of old socks, for example.
There are also lethal ovitraps, which kills the mosquito, but I havent experimented with those.
Is it possible to get the dunks/bits wet in some water then use a hose sprayer attachment to disperse the bt laced water around your yard to get the bt into soil and other places that are holding water (like spray anything along the side of one's house if they have a bunch of stuff that might be holding water sitting next to the house)?
You can just buy the Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis as a concentrate on Amazon [1] and use it in one of those mixing sprayers. It’s the most used pesticide in the world and considered nontoxic for the most part so it’s really easy to get in whatever form or concentration you need.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0006JLMQG
Mandatory if you have water troughs/tanks for animals such as goats or horses. Also a very good idea to encourage swallow nesting. Many an evening I watch a dozen or so swallows on our property dipping and diving in a sort or aerial mosquito feeding dance. Swallows are very cool btw. HTH, RF.
While swallows are definitely cool birbs, I would be very surprised if they had any noticeable effect on mosquito populations. There is even one study proposing that swallows attract more mosquitos!
https://academic.oup.com/jme/article/39/1/115/879132
choice quote:
> Cliff swallows occasionally eat mosquitoes (Brown and Brown 1996), but they represent an insignificant part of the diet
https://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/depredadores_naturales_de_l...
Well, these are barn swallows. They eat up to 1,000 insects per day, and up to 100 mosquitos per day (link below). We have at least a dozen, so perhaps 1,200 mozzie per evening (I hope). I think barn swallows are the most populous bird species. Again they are pretty cool. We also have lots of bats, but they are harder to track. HTH, RF.
https://worldwidebirder.com/what-do-barn-swallows-eat
African or European swallow?
I heard about a similar but different method:
Put some cloth in a bucket, fill it with water and wait. Once in a week, remove the cloth. This removes all eggs and larvae.
Apparently this is quite effective as mosquito "pheromones" (?) build up in the bucket. This makes the bucket a preferred breeding ground .
This might actually be worth my time.
I hate cutting my grass and don't spray because I don't want to decimate the ecosystem in my yard (also, I'm lazy and it's hot out, so mowing sucks) but mosquitoes are a real problem.
Has anyone had luck with bat boxes to help control the mosquito population?
Does this even cull the population down? If you're creating a perfect nesting area and then killing off the babies, you haven't really culled any of the active/dangerous mosquitos.
Am I missing something?
yes, the lifecycle of the mosquito is quick so the adults die off with age and the next generation dies in the bucket before they become adults. It doesn't help if you are at a camp site for two nights, but it does reduce population at your house.
I see-- but by providing a possible breeding ground, are you not inviting more adult/dangerous mosquitos into your home vicinity? It seems like this would be ideal if your neighbors did it, but you didn't.
If everyone did it then you might see a big reduction but it’s really only for the infestation near you not around you.
Cool. I had an idea recently of creating breeding buckets that automatically flush the water onto the ground and refill every day or two. Mosquito breeding decoys without chemicals.
Some species of mosquitoes are able to survive their egg site drying out for quite some time. They go dormant and then hatch when they are rehydrated.
I believe this is quite dependent on the timing in the lifecycle though so maybe there's a design for this that works regardless, just by getting the periodicity right.
Edit: ah no, according to AI, the window before they become dessication-resistand is very short.
However, another idea (actually even simpler, no moving parts): a UV lamp that turns on for an hour every day would probably kill them pretty dead!
We have a wooded area in the back, with small shallow pools of water that appear and disappear depending on rainfall. I tried mosquito dunks for a few years and gave up. Felt it needed too many to cover the area.
I will try again with buckets. The HW store actually has green buckets so it won't even look like a dump! Thanks for the posting!
A bit of a tangent, but BT is also great for getting rid of tomato hornworms. The bacteria is harmless to humans, but fatal to the hornworms. A single application saved my tomato plants last year.
That said, the more I garden, the more I find the entire process a bit horrifying. Waging biological warfare on the critters is not what I thought I was signing up for.
Yep - it's not too difficult to coax a thing to grow. Life, uh, finds a way.
Gardening is often much more about preventing the stuff that you don't want to grow from growing, whether that's weeds, microbes, fungus, insects, critters, etc.
> Waging biological warfare on the critters is not what I thought I was signing up for.
Alternate framing: A grey-goo apocalypse caused nanobots to consume and occupy all the convenient parts of the planet, and after billions of years of assimilation and hacking, some of the survivors formed a mobile hivemind megafortress which can "garden" and feel conflicted about it. :p
In other words, it's biological warfare all the way down.
I don't have a yard of my own, but my friend has one. A few years ago, I told him to use this bucket method and throw away the water to kill the wiggles of the mosquitoes, but he didn't want to believe it or he was just reluctant to do the work
There are "Honey Pot" programs. "Mosquito Bucket of Death" is a name waiting to be claimed.
Anything for deer flies and horse flies?
deer and horse flies are fundamentally different. a horse fly can be caught by a chemical attractant, think the "pop" traps. Which you can scale to a 5 gallon bucket no problem.
A deer fly goes after movement and the color blue, so your traps tend to be sticky traps, like a lowes bucket coated in tanglefoot. but you can't feed them to fish, chickens and they're a pain to clean.
I've been looking for someone to scale up some kind of fan trap for deer flies, like think a bigger version of the Katchy UV traps, but so far nobody has done anything. A fellow had a good example of using blue nitrile gloves blown up and coated in tanglefoot on a stick but while cheap, still messy.
Here's a thought -- there are instructions in various places for mosquito fan traps using a box or other sturdy fan plus mesh on one side.
Do that, but paint the fan (with blades) blue. If more movement is needed, you could probably do something pretty simple with a plastic plate painted blue and hung about a foot from the fan intake.
Cleanup isn't great, but it's better than sticky traps. Spray the mesh down with a 50:50 water:alcohol solution as needed to kill live flies in the trap before dumping.
In my parts, I've seen people put blue solo cups wrapped in glue/tape upside down on their lawnmowers or biking helmets as they're moving around.
I guess the same principle can be applied to various insects you don't like. Step 1: Figure out how they lay their eggs/create their spawn. Step 2: Build a contraption that is the ideal place for them to reproduce. Step 3: Use appropriate poison to kill them off.
I second this. I’m stood outside work being dive bombed by three of them as I type
Set up some bat houses around your property, they eat mosquitoes right out of the air.
Love the idea - I wonder what I can use in New Zealand though - these things can't be shipped to NZ (Note I'm not surprised by this fact, I didn't expect NZ to let in random loads of mosquito killing bacteria)
There are tons of Bacillus Thuringiensis products for the organic gardening market. I'm sure they're available in NZ.
Ahh ok thanks - I'll have to check it out.
Why not?
I figured it would be a biosecurity issue - looks like I'm wrong though which is good!
Forgot to mention this startup doing good work and it’s a promising lead. Getting lots of traction recently. https://terratis.fr/
Wouldn't you be able to just set up buckets of water and then dump the water every few days before the mosquito larvae hatch? Is the point of the bacteria that you can set and forget about them?
The longer the water sits, the more suitable it is for the larvae and the more likely it is that the adults will lay eggs in it. If you refresh it frequently, it won't be as appealing.
There is also a BT alternative: copper
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4940706/
We have pantry moths in the house (came in from the bird food)...is there anything similar for them? We use pheremone traps, but that's pretty late in the lifecycle and not 100%
Kill kill kill and discard grains. We have taken to freezing all grains that come in (flour, rice, bird seed) for at least a week before releasing it into the pantry.
Not that I know of. You can eliminate them from individual containers of food by freezing or by heating to fairly low temperatures (120°F?) that shouldn’t damage the food.
Food grade diatomaceous earth is somewhat safe, and you can sprinkle some around the corners of shelves.
I don't know if it's some anomaly of climate change but in recent years in this part of Central Europe there are less mosquitos and more common horse flies.
I'm super into this idea, especially as an alternative to spraying.
Has anyone found success in this approach? This could be a game changer for my backyard this fall.
I have tried this a few times. If you live in the woods with lots of standing water, then it has literally no effect. I bought a giant supply of bacillus thurengensis pellets and put them in every body of standing water around the property weekly for a whole summer and still got annihilated by mosquitos. Now I spray, and while I hate pouring chemicals all over the property, it works fantastically well.
I could imagine it working alright if you live in the city or maybe a suburban area.
Try putting temephos in the standing water.
Anyone else use mosquito fish? I got some from the pet store, put them in our small koi pond, and the mosquitoes really died off dramatically.
Some vector control programs give out mosquito fish, worth checking in. Where I live, mosquito fish are specifically discouraged in waters that may flow into natural waters because they can feed on native fish and amphibians. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any advice about what native fish I could put in the small, mucky, pond on my land. :( (Kitsap County, WA)
Problem with mosquito fish and other similar biocontrols is that they easily become invasive/noxious and disrupt the ecosystem in unintended ways. So if you plan to use them you need to be careful that they do not escape to nature, and in general it would be preferable to use native species instead
One thing I never see discussed about these is what you're supposed to do when rain inevitably fills the bucket.
We were promised mosquito laser zappers!
How does this affect other insects?
I did this last year and checked on it after the first day to find a drowned baby opossum.
Must have been a rough morning, sorry.
Not the first one this happened to. Article offers a suggestion:
> If you want to keep squirrels, chipmunks, and other small critters from getting trapped in the bucket, you also could put a piece of hardware cloth or chicken wire over the top of the bucket. To keep it in place, you can use zip ties.
Something to consider is that BTI kills many species of Diptera, not just mosquitoes.
I wish there were an equivalent for ticks.
If you're able to keep a few free-range chickens they'll eat ticks, at least those on the ground.
That’d be Guinea fowl, but all you’ve done is created a new problem unless you have a large area for them to range and a high tolerance for bird guano.
I just keep a bucket with some guppies in it. They eat the momma, the baby, and the eggs, the fish poop goes in the garden.
Ok, now what is the solution for hornets?
High pressure poison spray. There is an organic kind that IME works about as well as the synthetic ones: https://www.groworganic.com/products/ecosmart-wasp-hornet-ki...
Obligatory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamethrower?wprov=sfla1
More seriously, Hornets vs Spray Glue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCLCewL5NVg
(note: he's still wearing a full bee suit—so hornets are probably best left to pros—unless you're properly equipped & very brave!)
TLDR: you can put tablets of mosquito-killing bacteria in buckets.
Yeah lets just kill all the bugs, good move.
You have read the part where the sticks provide "good bugs that fall in [...] an escape path", right?
good bugs lol