Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death
energyvanguard.com385 points by almuhalil a day ago
385 points by almuhalil a day ago
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.
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
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
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
The fans in that video are probably 200-400W, running that nonstop seems pretty wasteful.
Unclear from the video: do you need to use any sort of bait or lure to attract mosquitoes upstream of the fan?
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
My neighbor's shed gutters are completely blocked. That definitely means that there's a limit on what I can do to help mitigate the issue.
you toss a dunk on their roof.
Or a small amount of diesel fuel (the dunks are safer). People sometimes do this with abandoned pools.
What does diesel do? Does the layer of oil prevent mosquitos from laying eggs?
Or mosquito bits
Mosquito bits and dunks are the same thing ya? Just slightly different form factor?
beware the undulated lids of garbage bins standing outside your house ... or an uncapped recycling bin
Water suitable for mosquito breeding in nature is probably three million times more common than the man-made.
Keep in mind the range of a tiny flying insect. I just took a walk and found 6 places where I could see the wrigglers going. I put dunks in them all. Probably killed about a thousand. Hopefully getting one back for the team.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Mosquitos are attracted to breeding sites, including the buckets. They may not successfully reproduce but they're still preferentially lured into your yard.
The common gardener's joke about these sort of bug attracting methods (eg Japanese beetle traps) is to buy one and put it in your neighbor's yard. :)
> 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.
dont tell them. theres nothing i love more than a site full of programmers swarming around a simple cheap product solution to a large scale ecological problem. keeps em off the other sites.
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.
The artificial look visibly demands a large amount of ongoing maintenance and thus acts as a convenient display of excess spending power. It's like the peacock's tail for capitalists.
This is true for a highly attractive wild lawn as well. When things grow truly wild, they're all competing and none do fantastically. If you've got a beautiful yard full of happy native plants, you've likely done some serious work, even if you're just out-competing the invasive plants.
That being said, a yard of native plants can still do more good than a yard of grass. Grasses are cool and come in many other forms though, and can be extremely resistant to drought. Native grasses often have much deeper roots, or even taproots sometimes.
although meadow style gardens would increase bugs, i imagine they would decrease mosquitos?
If you step on some of Florida's native plants you'll suddenly realize why St. Augustine grass is so popular down there.
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.
I had a neighbor with a bunch of trash in his backyard that collected water causing mosquito breeding. It was impossible to be outside for more than a few minutes. Despite being friendly with him, he took offense when I pointed out his problem and even offered to help lug the trash to the curb with him. Some people are just too proud.
Many places have vector control boards for just this type of situation. It’s a legitimate public health hazard.
> 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.
> people parking their cars on their lawns.
Indeed, God forbid people would like to park their cars on their property!
Some people like living in communities that look nice. It seems fair that you can opt-in to those rules by buying in an HOA, and if you do want to park on your lawn, buy elsewhere.
(And I am not a fan of HOAs personally, so I do in fact live elsewhere, but my neighbors house is also an eyesore)
Yes indeed! One of the reasons I'm personally happy to live in an HOA after having lived in an area where lawn junkyards were common.
Over maintained yards are a leading reason for having no biodiversity around your home. First you lose the bugs, then the birds and over time this extends to everything.
A 3" cut once a month during peak growing season is hardly "over maintained". Every HOA community I've lived in has been perfectly reasonable.
Without knowing where you are exactly, I can only give a vague and general response such as "in much of the USA, the mere existence of a lawn is 'over maintained'", see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping
Oh I don't live in Nevada or Arizona, if that's what you were implying. Also, this thread is about the utility of HOAs, so in the example you're giving, then HOA can actually be more beneficial since they often include bylaws to restrict or prevent landscaping and watering during periods of water conservation. It goes both ways.
What I'm implying is: HOAs can mandate bad things, including in various cases lawns, because an absence of good reasoning when mimicking others isn't the preserve of individuals.
I think the next house I move to, I will look for an HOA that prohibits combustion-powered yard tools, and hires an all-electric crew for common maintenance, cost be damned.
Death to combustion powered yard tools!!!
So frickin noisy!!!!
Even worse is, say you have 20 neighbors on the block each scheduling yard maintenance separately, then it's like the balls in bins problem, and you pretty much end up with these abominations making noise at least once a day (and weekends included because that's when Dad has time to do the weekend warrior thing and it takes him 3x as long as a professional crew). Sigh.
> I've gotten nothing but benefits from living in neighborhoods with HOAs.
I'm happy somebody has. Except for you, I have never heard anything but nightmares from the people I know who suffer under HOAs.
No one is going to rant about how their HOA is pretty OK.
My building has an HOA, and the worst I can say about is that's it's pretty boring.
There's a vast difference between the HOA for a building, and one for a suburban neighborhood.
My suburban neighborhood has an HOA and it's fine. Most of what they do is take care of the community swimming pools, sports fields, dog park, tennis courts, and landscaping and signage along the roads.
I question the motivation of people choosing to live in a place where they are constantly at odds with the agreed-upon standards of the community. They should leave if it is really that stressful and onerous.
It's not a question of being at odds with the agreed-upon standards. They aren't.
> They should leave if it is really that stressful and onerous.
Easier said than done. A few people I know found that it was difficult to sell their home because the existence of an HOA scares off buyers.
> difficult to sell their home because the existence of an HOA scares off buyers
It can be a concern. But I actually found the opposite to be true in my case. During my house-hunt I was far more turned-off by the appearance and disrepair of several houses and properties near the places that I was looking at. So it can definitely be a consideration from both perspectives.
The problem is that those standards can change based on who's elected or chosen to run the HOA.
Such is the problem with living in a "town" -- or anywhere with a city/community council. People are allowed to move to an adjacent neighborhood, or county, or anywhere, if they don't like the standards and governance.
they can, but in my experience rule changes are approximately zero. All of the HOAs I've lived in have been very reasonable. When I was on the receiving end of notices - they were well-deserved as much as they were embarrassing.
The thing that really makes me wonder are some of the horror stories where new homeowners were surprised by the HOA existence, or at least some of the enforcement actions. It also seems like an easy thing to fake for the clicks, who knows.
> place where they are constantly at odds with the agreed-upon standards of the community.
I didn't write those standards, so why would I agree with them? Should I be homeless now?
You seem to not understand what a Homeowner Association is. You have to agree to the rules in order to live in the community. However, you can choose not to agree to the rules if you don't like them. In which case, you can move somewhere else in order to avoid homelessness.
You can’t have a property under an HOA that you didn’t agree to. Either you were the owner when the original HOA was entered into, or you were aware of it when you purchased the property.
And this is how we get Redlining
Not sure how redlining comes into this. Everyone in my neighborhood provided no fewer than 3 signatures in a contract agreeing to abide by the well-documented community standards for use and upkeep of their property.
I’m sure those community standards don’t suggest in any way that they might impinge on the freedom of expression of any minorities who might consider moving to the neighbourhood…
> freedom of expression
I don't believe that it is a constitutional right to live in a neighborhood that will permit you to operate a chop-shop in your overgrown yard.
From what I can tell, HOA experiences - like politics - are highly dependent on the folks who would make good decision-makers actually being interested in, and attaining, the level of power in the association to make those decisions.
I've seen both - folks who are good stewards of the community's money and add to its energy, and folks who can't manage money and exhaust the community's energy on trivialities.
> Basic stuff
You like paying extra for stuff that is normally included in your property taxes? I'm dumbfounded.
Property taxes basically never pay for privately owned things, be that landscaping in common spaces, maintenance of private neighborhood roads, etc.
The alternative is public space and public roads.
These don't work because suburbs are a ponzi scheme that is collapsing.
People are grudgingly willing to pay to put in a brand new sewer once. No one wants to fund maintenance or pay millions to replace it in 60 years and cities are literally going bankrupt because the population density isn't enough to maintain the infrastructure.
Cities realized this decades ago which is why many are reluctant to add more unsustainable public roads/sewers/etc. and insist new development owns and funds them privately....which tends to require a HOA to fund maintenance from communal contributions/reserves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/benjamin-h...
My back yard neighbors live on a private street with an HOA. When the city water pressure went high for a brief period of time, they were one of the few places to have water lines burst. Their private supply lines were not of the same rating as the city lines that supply similar neighborhoods. Since this was private, this HOA was on the hook for ripping up the street, repairing water lines, and fixing their street. Being a customer that doesn’t normally need such services, the fix was done a couple months after the water lines break. They had a week or so with no water and many weeks of water being fed to their homes via hoses connecting a fire hydrant and the spigots they would normally use to get water outside.
They were so lucky this happened in the summer. In the winter, the hoses would have frozen solid.
These folks were very sad the city’s water utility couldn’t do the work. They fix water main breaks within a couple days, usually the same day.
"Keeps the neighborhood from looking like a dump."
The single highest priority in life. Completely reasonable to give up everything else to get that.
HOAs can be good. Like many things, HOAs are not inherently bad or good. It’s the people who run them.
I lived in a four unit condo buildings before and the HOA was fine, because all residents were on the board.
I now live in a more typical suburban HOA development and the HOA is very unobtrusive and only comes down on the actual problem properties (overgrown, uninhabited houses) and doesn’t do much other than handle common area upkeep. Dues are only $150 per year.
A neighbor had a bus under renovation in their driveway for a few years. That really bothered one guy, the rest of us just rolled our eyes.
HOA is another layer of local government, I think it's great that moving is a chance to choose the government (or anarchy) that you prefer.
I have a friend whose parents built a 48' sailboat in their yard over about a dozen years. "built" as in cast the lead keel, laid the fiberglass hull, etc. etc. This was in a traditional suburban neighborhood, but no HOA. So they had to be pretty good friends with their neighbors.
HOAs are like any government. Some are run well and have good laws, others not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To each their own. I much prefer to live in the neighbourhood where each neighbour does what they feel like with their property, within reason. It ought not be any business of yours what I do with my yard, front or back, as long as it doesn't adversely affect your enjoyment of your own property - and this last part is key - as a reasonable person would interpret it. In other words, smells and health hazards - sure. Unexplainable hatred for wildflowers, uncut grass and the laughter of children - go ahead and send a passive aggressive note straight to /dev/null for all I care.
The issue is that it's hard to agree on where the line is and (without a HOA) impossible to enforce.
Wildflowers? Generally good.
Tall grass that allows rats to thrive and spread into adjacent yards? Bad.
Most people don't want to have to go to court to battle pedantic neighbors who confuse the two.
If it comes to it, cops, 311 and probably other means are available. It's possible to enforce and court is not needed.
Heh in my neighborhood (oakcliff in Dallas TX) if you’re white and have a garage sale without a permit it’s like committing a felony. If you’re not white, code enforcement will come help you set up and tear down no permit required.
It's hard enough to get the cops to come out to a robbery - I know of nowhere in America where they're bored enough to come look at someone with poor landscaping.
Unless you're a decamillionaire (or a cop), the cops in America don't care about you.
> I know of nowhere in America where they're bored enough to come look at someone with poor landscaping.
People get fines all the time for failing to cut their grass. Some cities just love the income. They can add up to several thousand (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/in-court-of-appeals/168774...).
If you're feeling like an asshole and you complain to the city about your neighbors overgrown yard most places will start fining your neighbor daily if it's actually a problem. It's not really a police matter though.
>"within reason".
Key word there. HOA rules exist for the sole purpose of defining a common, enforceable, agreed upon definition of "within reason".
> and the laughter of children
This I will take a nuanced position on. If your kids are playing in the backyard, and it doesn't impact me at all ... perfect please enjoy life.
But I can often hear people outside, especially children screeching and yelling, over my television with all of my doors and windows shut and the air conditioner on full blast.
In those scenarios, the laughter IS adversely affecting the ability of other people to enjoy their own property.
Sometimes I hear dogs barking and loud cars on the street. Or just the constant drone of weed whackers and leaf blowers from about april to october. I have triple glazed windows and eight inch thick walls so I don't hear any of it when I go inside.
children screeching and yelling, provided that it isn't going on for hours at a time or in the middle of night, is just a normal consequence of living in a community.
I do feel for people who move in next to schools or public pools/playgrounds but considering how much time kids spend indoors these days I'd guess that people today have it much easier than people did in the past.
I'd much rather have to occasionally be reminded that kids are somewhere playing and having a good time than deal with a lot of the other noises that can disrupt a person's day like loud cars/motorcycles, drunk people fighting, landscapers or sirens.
> children screeching and yelling, provided that it isn't going on for hours at a time
But it does often go on for hours at a time. And I'm not talking about a school zone or a park. As another person pointed out, if you move next to a school or a park you know what you are signing up for. But in a quiet suburb, if the issue is new neighbours that weren't there when you bought the house.. or who just started a family recently. That's something that's being imposed on you that didn't exist before.
And we don't tolerate this when it is barking dogs or loud music. Most cities have noise ordinances and I even read mine because of problematic neighbours. Not because of children, mind you. The man was an alcoholic who would get drunk early in the morning and go into his backyard where he would have loud screaming matches with hallucinations which terrified our small daughters so I wanted to know if the noise ordinance covered it. Answer is, technically yes but the police don't enforce yelling and hollering despite it being spelled out in the letter of the bylaw.
Why is it acceptable to expect people to keep their pets quiet, their music at a reasonable volume, their power tools and machinery at bay and to not have extremely loud parties where people are screaming and blasting noise ... but the second it's loud children we're talking about oh no ... you just need to learn to "live in a community"?
You can make the same argument about anything. Living with neighbours who have tall grass is part of "living in a community." Some people don't care about well trimmed lawns. Motorcycles with extremely loud engines, just part of "living in a community." Barking dogs. Honking car horns etc. etc. etc. We have noise ordinances for a reason; noise directly affects other people.
And I say all of this as a parent who raised two daughters to adulthood. I don't understand this weird standard. We (their mother and I) always expected our children to be respectful of our neighbours.
If you move next to a playground you should know what you're doing. My parents live next to a school on purpose and we all enjoy the sounds of children when we're out in the yard. Recess isn't even that long and always happens in the middle of a weekday.
> edit: apparently you guys don't like HOAs haha. Well I love them. Keeps the neighborhood from looking like a dump.
This is so good, it can be used as a textbook definition of a strawman.
Oh, how I’ve never wanted downvote power more.
Submit interesting unique links and post more substantive comments (maybe add a paragraph or two your previous comment) and you will be able to downvote soon enough. But I don't understand the appeal, when I do it is usually accidental (really easy to do on a tablet)...
I usually downvote comments that are derailing the thread or are so lazy as to feel like a waste of my time to have read.
I'll often upvote comments with opinions that are counter to my own, especially if they are presented in a clear, coherent, or novel way that causes me to think a bit.
Downvoting is a gated power on this site?
You just need 500 karma to downvote.
It helps prevent brigading and ensures that users have a moment to adjust to the community and its general expectations before being able to participate in community moderation.
If a user cannot reach that low bar after a while, they probably aren't a particularly active or positive member of the community.
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.
CO2 traps (using CO2 tank, yeast, decaying plant matter) are effective at attracting mosquitos but not other bugs (from experience)
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.
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."
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.
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.
Bacillus thuringiensis is the most used pesticide in existence and has been for nearly a century. We’ve sprayed it everywhere in huge quantities, including on pretty much anything labeled “organic.”
This is a confusing analogy because it's more like releasing 1,000 goats then wondering why they don't have an effect.
My non-SME answer to this thread is:
1) 100 years is not that long in evolutionary terms; 2) cropland is large but not all land; 3) evolution is complex; 4) resistance is actually already observed in some species.
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?
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"
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?)
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
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?)
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.
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
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.
you usually use a chemical attractant insert along with the device. I have one of these. Success seems to be hit or miss. I've run one for a year and it seems to only accidentally catch mosquitos, and that's not a unique outcome. But then others seem to have massive success.
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.
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.
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
My in-laws use a system like this, maybe the same one. It uses a CO2 tank rather than burning propane. He runs it 24/7 and he needs to refill the CO2 tank every 1-2 weeks iirc so it's definitely more expensive to run than the death bucket. I think it's a 20 pound tank like you'd see on a homebrew keg system. When he showed it to me, it had caught an absolutely nightmarish number of mosquitoes over the course of a couple days. Like maybe half a liter to a liter in volume squirming around in the net. It made me queasy honestly. I didn't notice anything like bees or butterflies in the trap but I didn't look very closely.
Don't worry, when you press them into a party and fry em up, they're quite moreish
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I presume so. Here's a great example of it with bacteria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDa4-nSc7J8
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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 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?
Yeah exactly. If I move elsewhere for like 30s I'll get bitten. Or my ankles will be exposed or something.
Same with incense-style repellents, I'm pretty convinced they reduce the number of mosquitoes but eventually one will be attracted to me via some path where the repellent isn't currently flowing and I'll get bitten regardless. (I think that smoke is also probably pretty bad for you if you use it a lot, too).
And since the difference between one bite and zero bites is a really big deal I usually just go for on-skin repellents.
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.
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.
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 .
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 definitely notice an increase in local (my backyard) mosquito activity if I accidentally leave standing water around. So I can see this working.
There are "Honey Pot" programs. "Mosquito Bucket of Death" is a name waiting to be claimed.
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.
Set up some bat houses around your property, they eat mosquitoes right out of the air.
There is also a BT alternative: copper
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.
Why not?
I figured it would be a biosecurity issue - looks like I'm wrong though which is good!
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.
One thing I never see discussed about these is what you're supposed to do when rain inevitably fills the bucket.
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.
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
We were promised mosquito laser zappers!
Anything for deer flies and horse flies?
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
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.
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.
Something to consider is that BTI kills many species of Diptera, not just mosquitoes.
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.
I wish there were an equivalent for ticks.
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.
If you're able to keep a few free-range chickens they'll eat ticks, at least those on the ground.
How does this affect other insects?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?