In my futile quest to get more people to make mosquito traps for their yards, I made a visual.

[alessandro@twit.social]

@colinpurrington is this preferable to a birdbath?

[colinpurrington@flipping.rocks]

@Alessandro My bird bath tends to get zero mosquito egg rafts and I think it's because mosquitoes will opt for water closer to the ground whenever possible. The exception might be mosquitoes that specialize in tree holes that collect water, but I'm not sure about that. Anyway, yes, I think buckets are better than bird baths as mosquito-killing containers. But the more sites the better because many species display skip-oviposition behavior, dropping a partial load of eggs in containers all over the yard.

[colinpurrington@flipping.rocks]

@catch56 If you can saturate your neighborhood with Bti honeypot traps early in the season the population of mosquitoes will never explode. Deploying them late or in low numbers will have much less of a noticeable effect. If you want to kill the adults, and you should, I would highly recommend investing in autocidal gravid ovitraps. They are expensive, unfortunately, but I love them. https://colinpurrington.com/2019/03/mosquito-traps-that-work/

[vreer@todon.nl]

@colinpurrington Israelensis .. sure that will be good at kiling

[colinpurrington@flipping.rocks]

And don't forget to weaponize your pond. Mosquitoes in my yard have left approximately 1000 egg rafts in mine this spring. And because each raft has 100s of eggs the number of larvae that end up dying is considerable. #mosquitoes #pond #ponds

[gardengnome666@mastodon.social]

@colinpurrington mosquitoes play a crucial role in the functioning of ecosystems. a single bat, for example, can eat up to 4000 mosquitoes in a night. birds, frogs, dragonflies, et cetera rely on mosquito populations for food. traps and poisons take away food from local species (and kill indiscriminately) already driven to extinction through the transformation of space into human centric landscapes. mosquitoes are pollinators too. just some food for thought. #environment #mosquitoes

[gardengnome666@mastodon.social]

@colinpurrington my advice to anyone bothered by mosquitoes is to do everything you can to support wildlife. support dark spaces for bats, create places for frogs, and for birds and dragonflies, et cetera. darkness is important actually, some research has suggested that leaving lights on outside at night increases the feeding time for mosquitoes

[colinpurrington@flipping.rocks]

@gardengnome666 It's definitely something worth thinking about. I don't think anyone has studied the effects of home use of Bti but I like to think it would be far better than the current situation where (at least in the United States) people fog their yards with pyrethroids ... which can kill any small invertebrate.

[rouxdoo@mastodon.social]

@colinpurrington
Drop some yeast in there and it will let off CO2 which will attract female mosquitos to the bucket.

[colinpurrington@flipping.rocks]

@rouxdoo Yeast alone would do nothing and I suspect you'd need to add pounds of sugar every day to emit ecologically relevant levels of CO2. Mosquitoes rely too much on heat and odor for CO2 alone to work. Details here in case of interest: https://colinpurrington.com/2020/08/yeast-based-mosquito-control-devices/

[magnusidode@defcon.social]

@colinpurrington
That’s a smart approach. Using bacteria like Bti to control mosquito populations is a great example of targeted biological control.

[mugsysrapsheet@mastodon.social]

@colinpurrington
Another simple anti-#mosquito trick is fill a spray bottle with a 10:1 water:dishwasher-detergent solution and spray any standing water you see.

The detergent breaks up the surface tension of the water so mosquitoes can't land on it to lay their eggs.

Dishwasher-detergent doesn't foam as much as regular soap, so you can lightly shake the solution to mix it before using.

(If you don't have any dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent works just as well though it foams more.)

[colinpurrington@flipping.rocks]

@MagnusIdode I really wish every single town pushed its residents to deploy mosquito buckets. Soooo much cheaper than buying tons of insecticides and of course the trucks needed for the fogging efforts.

[colinpurrington@flipping.rocks]

@MugsysRapSheet But only would work for species that land on water to oviposit. Many, such as Asian tiger mosquito, land on the sides of the containers and pop out just one or two eggs. They are the devils, too.

[anne_delong@musician.social]

@colinpurrington @2legged

An ovillanta is a bit of a different approach. A tray of water is set out; mosquitoes lay eggs in the water, Once a week the water is run though a screen, removing any larva. The same water is put back in the tray, because now it smells like mosquito larva, which will attract more mosquitos to lay eggs there. No chemicals needed, but you must remember to use the screen every week.

Ovillanta - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

#mosquito