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Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

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Re: Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

#61

Post by palashkulsh »

IpV8 wrote: post #25
joenot443 wrote: post #11

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 imagin…

Try putting temephos in the standing water.

Re: Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

#62

Post by mattmaroon »

bjackman wrote: post #34
siliconc0w wrote: post #10

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.

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)

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?

Re: Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

#63

Post by schiffern »

tqwhite wrote: post #18

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.

Re: Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

#64

Post by lambdaone »

svantana wrote: post #48

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.

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.

Re: Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

#65

Post by 11235813213455 »

nicolaslem wrote: post #57

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) mosquito…

Other natural solution is having either fish, ducks, dragonflies, frogs, toads or other of the many things feeding on mosquito or their larvae

Re: Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

#67

Post by filleokus »

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?

Re: Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

#68

Post by chasil »

Spagbol wrote: post #29

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…

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."

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