• Plant your mosquitoes! Plant sweet basil, geraniums or garlic around your patio to repel mosquitoes.
• Trap them! Put a 5-gallon bucket half-filled with water in a damp, shady corner. Put in ½ cup of sweet-smelling dishwashing liquid like Lemon Joy. The mosquitoes will land on the water and drown.
• Gone with the wind! Blow them away! A fan in a doorway or across the patio is like a hurricane to mosquitoes.
• A walk in the park! Most mosquitoes that plague people near wooded areas lay their eggs in the soil in depressions, which fill with water after rainfall events. After it rains, walk through the woods in your house and look in these spots. Often you can see the mosquito larva or “wigglers” in the water. If you don’t know what they look like, watch a YouTube of them in action. You can treat these areas yourself safely, (get the owner’s permission first.) Use a light mineral oil such as Bonide Larvicide Oil. It breaks the surface tension, and the larva sink and drown. Tip: Add an ounce of fish oil for every gallon of larvicide oil. The smell of fish will keep mother mosquito from laying eggs again in that spot.
• Oil it! If you have a rain barrel or a bird bath, add a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. It won’t hurt the birds, but it will drown the mosquito larva.
• Liar, liar, pants on fire! Remember the mosquito encased in amber in the movie Jurassic Park? That was a Toxorhychites mosquito; Tox for short. Tox mosquitoes don’t bite people or animals. They feed on plant juice so that it couldn’t have sucked up any dinosaur DNA. A Toxorhychites mosquito was chosen because it is the world’s largest mosquito.
• Dracula, smacula! So, you think count Dracula could drink some blood? When people think of mosquitoes, they usually think of swamps and jungle. The worst place for mosquitoes is on the arctic tundra when the permafrost melts in the spring. That’s when the arctic mosquito - Aedes communis, hatches by the trillions. They’re waiting for the caribou herds to arrive. When they do, some unlucky, slow animals will be covered with mosquitoes like fur and exsanguinated. That’s drained completely dry of blood, by the way.
• Angel of death! If there is someone with a disease such as dengue fever, malaria, or Zitka virus and the mosquito bites them and then bites you, you can get the disease. It is estimated that mosquitoes have killed more people than all the wars in human history and still kill one person every 70 seconds!
• What are mosquitoes good for? That’s what the kids used always to ask me when I’d teach classes in schools. I wasn’t going to tell them the real answer - which is mosquitoes are nature’s hypodermic needles used to spread deadly organisms, especially viruses, around. Instead, I’d just tell them, “Yes, mosquitoes are there to make sure you kids go home at night!”
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