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?

The fans in that video are probably 200-400W, running that nonstop seems pretty wasteful.

Fun to see Dan's videos :) (he made a lot about solar concentration too)

On a larger scale, there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI3HE7BcIBk&pp=ygUQbW9zcXVpd... about mosquito factories

Unclear from the video: do you need to use any sort of bait or lure to attract mosquitoes upstream of the fan?

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.

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

[dead]

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"

No, it means they'll lay the same amount of eggs (which is the max they can produce), but a significant portion of them will be in your trap rather than somewhere they can survive. Of those that aren't in the trap, they're still subject to the same death rate they would normally be subject to

There are multiple limiting factors on mosquito egg-laying - availability of water is just one of them. The energy/nutrition required to produces eggs (which comes from blood) is also a factor, plus time, etc.

I'm sure there is some extra egg-laying, but there are also eggs laid there that would have otherwise been in suitable water.

I put Mosquito dunks in the buckets in my yard which kills the larvae, it has worked so far, no standing water plus dunks where water might pool.

If there are more mosquitoes than egg-laying spots, then yes. If there are more egg-laying spots than mosquitoes, then no.

It's not the _water_ in the toilet that's gross to drink...

People have probably not defecated in your fresh water pipes. Your toilet bowl can’t claim the same.

It's the same in the US. I think the author probably just meant that slightly buggy "pond" water is no worse than toiler water for a pet.

(Americans also like to put all kinds of chemical pucks/cleaner devices in our toilets, so maybe the author is referring to that?)

Porcelain isn't zero percent porous. It's just the least porous material that can also support the weight of two people when fashioned into the shape of a toilet. There's a reason toilet cleaners still contain bleach.

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.

Ironically toilets are usually one of the cleanest locations in the US. There is no real concern about chemicals used, since no one should be drinking or eating from a toilet bowl. Generally speaking you wouldn't wash your plates with bleach

Would you drink out of your toilet?

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.

In the US we shit in our toilets.

I watched a hummingbird decimate a cloud of mosquitoes just a few weeks ago. It was fascinating; it hovered around them like an attack helicopter, and would dart in and out, then find a different angle, then dart in and out again. With every dart the cloud thinned until within a minute it was all gone.

Came here to say that a bat house is a self-perpetuating mosquito bucket of death that requires practically zero maintenance after install and doesn't introduce potentially invasive species of bacteria to the environment

I 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.

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.

How is that better than what the article describes? You need gas, electricity (outdoors!) and get constant fan noise.

Very cool where can I get on?

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.

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 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.

The one thing this needs to really scale up the murder is a CO2 source behind the fan to attract mosquitoes actively.

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.

"Laser-wielding device is like an anti-aircraft system for mosquitoes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478171

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.

The Gates foundation funded research into just such a device.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

People have made prototypes but I think there may be hazzard if it gets your retina rather than a bug.

There was an interesting idea the other day for a mini drone that bashes them with its prop - top comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702833

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

You can just buy the Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis as a concentrate on Amazon [1] and use it in one of those mixing sprayers. It’s the most used pesticide in the world and considered nontoxic for the most part so it’s really easy to get in whatever form or concentration you need.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0006JLMQG

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...

African or European swallow?

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.

If everyone did it then you might see a big reduction but it’s really only for the infestation near you not around you.

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!

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.

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.

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

There are tons of Bacillus Thuringiensis products for the organic gardening market. I'm sure they're available in NZ.

Why not?

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.

Kill kill kill and discard grains. We have taken to freezing all grains that come in (flour, rice, bird seed) for at least a week before releasing it into the pantry.

Not that I know of. You can eliminate them from individual containers of food by freezing or by heating to fairly low temperatures (120°F?) that shouldn’t damage the food.

Food grade diatomaceous earth is somewhat safe, and you can sprinkle some around the corners of shelves.

I have tried this a few times. If you live in the woods with lots of standing water, then it has literally no effect. I bought a giant supply of bacillus thurengensis pellets and put them in every body of standing water around the property weekly for a whole summer and still got annihilated by mosquitos. Now I spray, and while I hate pouring chemicals all over the property, it works fantastically well.

I could imagine it working alright if you live in the city or maybe a suburban area.

Some vector control programs give out mosquito fish, worth checking in. Where I live, mosquito fish are specifically discouraged in waters that may flow into natural waters because they can feed on native fish and amphibians. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any advice about what native fish I could put in the small, mucky, pond on my land. :( (Kitsap County, WA)

Problem with mosquito fish and other similar biocontrols is that they easily become invasive/noxious and disrupt the ecosystem in unintended ways. So if you plan to use them you need to be careful that they do not escape to nature, and in general it would be preferable to use native species instead

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.

If you're able to keep a few free-range chickens they'll eat ticks, at least those on the ground.

That’d be Guinea fowl, but all you’ve done is created a new problem unless you have a large area for them to range and a high tolerance for bird guano.

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!)

You have read the part where the sticks provide "good bugs that fall in [...] an escape path", right?