Our neighborhood is home to plenty of mosquitos, including a wide variety of types. So this year we’ve set up some buckets outside, which we keep about a third full with water along with a handful of grass clippings. Nice and stagnant, funky and swampy. Of course this is a perfect place for mosquitos to lay their eggs, and for the larvae to grow into adults! Madness, you must be thinking.
The trick is that we also add “Mosquito Dunks” that contain a variety of BT; the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. This particular strain of BT attacks the mosquito larvae, and very little else. So the buckets become a dead end for mosquitos.
Our house also features a foundation drainage system that has a sump that usually has standing water, so we toss a bit of a dunk in there too.
A mosquito breeding pit.
As experiments go, this one is rather poor, for having no control to compare against. But it does seem like the mosquitos are less than they could be, and we are able to sit outside and not be immediately carried off by a cloud of the tiny monsters. The buckets definitely attract the interest of egg laying adults, and one can spot their eggs on the surface of the water. But there is no sign of active larvae. So we’ll call it a win.
This approach does require a bit of a commitment, since the dunks call for renewal about every month, and more often if we get a lot of rain. So this is not a set-it-and-forget-it system; if we neglect to keep up with the buckets then we will indeed have a mosquito festival.
Next year we’ll probably do this again, though we may also look into the new adult mosquito traps that promise to remove the insects that out and actively looking for a blood meal.