skeeters!!

[wasabi]

<font color=blue> Hello all... just curious if anyone knows a good way to keep down the mosquitos...By good way I mean environmentally friendly and cheap!</font color=blue>

Aside from reducing the mosquito’s breeding areas, which provides legitimate excuses for great tractor projects…(lets fill in some puddles and ditches today)…/w3tcompact/icons/grin.gif, another answer is to attract purple martins and small colonies of bats /w3tcompact/icons/shocked.gif.

Little brown bats love to eat mosquitoes and can catch over 1,200 tiny insects in an hour. Fear of rabies and aversion to these creatures undoubtedly deter many folks from building small wooden houses to attract them, but statistically, it's safer than owning a dog or planting flowers. The twilight bat has a perfect safety record, and even (Mexican) free-tailed bats are far safer than having dogs in a neighborhood. The incidence of trouble with bats is nearly negligible. Flowers attract bees whose stings account for far more human fatality than bats.

The only other comment I could add is we found it impossible to shoot them with a pellet gun as kids. /w3tcompact/icons/hmm.gif...must have been their superior radar /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

Here’s a link on how to make a bat house: http://www.batcon.org/bhra/economyhouse.html

Here’s one on how to attract them: http://www.batcon.org/bhra/bhcriter.html

 

[DVerbarg]

<font color=blue>Anyone had experience with this Basic H?</font color=blue>

Used it years ago. Its effectiveness seemed to vary. At times it was great and at other times it seemed the skeeters did not care what you had on, they were too hungry to care.

The strange I learned from the Basic H use is that even when they bit, it did not itch or welt the same way as it would without the Basic H. Discovered that if I washed a skeeter bite with any good soap immediately after the bite that the welt would be minimal or non-existant and the itching would not occur. Made me wonder if the Basic H was detering the skeeters or just providing a "film" of a "soap" that would counteract the skeeter bite. Never tried to do a "real" study to determine if Basic H kept them at bay or just kept me from itching, just used the stuff. Have not used it in years, maybe I should try it again.

 

[gmason]

2 months ago I bought the small Magnent from HD here locally for $399 (MSRP). We've been soooooo dry here all spring/summer theat there really hasn't been many of the little buggers. I set it up and over the first month there were only a few carcuses in the net. Could really even tell if they were skeeters or what.

We've recently started to get some rain fall, so I'm hoping to see my "bug count" go upward.

BTW, mine is "corded" meaning it runs off a household electric line(via 100' extension cord).

If I could find something for the deer flies then that would be nice too...

gary

 

[sugarmaker]

<font color=blue>If I could find something for the deer flies then that would be nice too...</font color=blue>

If you're referring to the buggers in the attached photo, I find they love to land on my head. I've attached a piece of flypaper to my hat so when they land it's the last thing they do. I'm not sure I get any fewer bites, but the revenge element is superb. I credit a blurb years ago in Yankee Magazine for the idea.

Regular flypaper is difficult to handle, so I've found a flypaper-like product on stiff clear plastic sheets; our local hardware store carries it in a yellow box. It's intended for attachment to house windows to collect flies, and is sticky only on one side. I cut an 8x2 sheet in half, and safety-pin it to my hat.

I now see someone is selling this idea as a <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.biconet.com/traps/deerflyPatch.html>product</A>.