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.
Readit News
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish
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
On a larger scale, there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI3HE7BcIBk&pp=ygUQbW9zcXVpd... about mosquito factories
In general though, if there are enough mosquitos around they will get caught in it without any additional effort.
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?
They do take a while to take effect, and they do take maintenance, but my experience so far is that they're super effective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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!
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
One thing that an HOA might actually be good for - I would love to see what happens if our entire neighborhood did this.
I can't understand the people that think the artificial look holds any beauty whatsoever.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
"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."
Evolution is complex and 100 years is not very long. But eventually some effect is likely.
There's clearly something going on where their systems are being extra cautious on what can and cannot be shipped to CA.
No affiliation: https://us.biogents.com/
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.
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.