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We use In2Care traps. We’re located in a forest on a Caribbean island that gets lots of mosquitoes! Once I started using those traps, the mosquito population went down 95%.
The trap attracts the momma mosquito, who sticks her bum in the water to lay her eggs. There is a bacteria in the water that kills the larva, and it contaminates her bum so she contaminates the other water sources with the bacteria when she lays her eggs there.
I love it because it’s targeting mosquitoes and not other insects - and it works.
Add to your list - mosquito rackets. This is by far the best one I’ve found:
The Executioner Fly Killer Mosquito Swatter Racket Wasp Bug Zapper Indoor Outdoor Over 50cm Long Amazon.com
Caveat on the bug zappers – I know I’ve seen an article about the ratio of beneficial or harmless insects to mosquitoes killed, and it’s not a great outcome.
Found it:
If that is accurate, maybe a zapper more qualifies as “pest theater” to impress the guests!
I briefly had a zapper last year. It killed so many moths I couldn’t even tell how many mosquitos it got. And the mess was unpleasant. I ended up buying the mosquito curtains that I previously posted about here and giving the zapper to a friend.
I tried the zappers too but won’t use them now. Enjoying a glass of wine on the balcony watching the sun go down is lovely but not if you have to endure the sounds and smells of a lizard being zapped…
Works on a different principle, but I read about something similar as far as knocking out the mosquito population.
It was an article in the newspaper Science section about 20 years ago. Scientists were working in an area of Africa where dengue and malaria were rampant.
Only the breeding females are the bloodsuckers- what mosquitoes normally feed on is fermented fruit and flower nectar. So they hung some things like bird feeders around that contained this mixture of the fruit juice and a chemical to kill mosquitos.
Within a week, the mosquito population had been knocked back 90%.
However, the chemical they used was too expensive for locals to be able to afford, so they then tried it with simple boric acid in the juice and found it worked just as well.
Some scientist or geek did a study and found that the bug splatter goes out up to 30 feet. That’s THIRTY feet of bug body bits splatting across the lanai. Nope. Nope. Nopeity Nope.
The mosquitoes were legion and vicious here in SW Ontario, Canada, last summer. It was so bad that I added them to my dangerous animal list. Maybe that helped no one complain?
I was furious at them myself. I flicked one from the clean fitted sheet I had just put in place. Having just bit me, I guess, it exploded my blood in a little arc. Fortunately, very fresh blood is easy enough to rinse out on the spot, but, ugh, it’s bad enough dealing with guest blood, let alone host blood, too.
Little monsters.
I offered the comensation to the guest and she did not leave me a review. The perfect five stars in this listing are preserved.
I left her a scathing review at the last minute warning other hosts that the guest figured out imperfections in my listing and kept figuring out ways to ask for compensation.
That’s what IB hosts check out. Non IB hosts don’t see guest star ratings, so they are useless for us- we rely on the written reviews. The star ratings and written reviews should jive.
