Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

You might try mosquito fish as a biological control. They also are effective in abandoned swimming pools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish

I wonder if the Bt bacteria were spreading beyond the buckets, affecting larvae elsewhere.

Why rotate?

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?

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.

> 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.

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!

I’d still take 10% as many mosquitoes over 100%.

Yeah, I tried using the dunks as-is when we first moved to the semi-woods and realized how Sisepheyan the task was. That said, this bucket approach is interesting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My closest neighbor is about 500 feet away

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."

Interesting. I have fungus gnat problems as well. I am going to give this a try, thanks for the tip!

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?

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.

Interesting, would any other cheap readily available acid (like citric) work too?

Prevents scurvy too!

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 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.