First let me say that I know mosquitos don’t reproduce, lay eggs or hatch normally in compost; they need standing water.
I’ve been hammered by mosquitos in my back yard to where it is unbearable to function without chemical protection. I can’t be out there for 3 minutes without being chased back inside.
Whenever I fiddle with my compost pile it seems to kick up a cloud of mosquitos. So I sprayed it down with a chrysanthumum based insecticide a couple of days ago and…
very few mosquitos in my back yard at all for the last two days. There were a few, but not the teaming hordes. All I have is my anecdotal experience, and it does make some sense that they would be attracted to the heat and gases from the compost.
Googling doesn’t find much other than some further anectdotal suggestions, followed by others who say mosquitos aren’t attracted by compost and they don’t reproduce there. Is there anything else people can find about this.
Is there more evidence that mosquitos are attracted to compost? NOTE: I’m not implying they lay eggs or hatch in compost; I know they don’t normally.
Possibly there is an attraction to the gases composting produces? I think some types of skeeters hone in on CO2 (exhaled or otherwise such as used for trap-bait, iirc) and possibly there’s gases that the skeeters think is close to food-source. I am not certain of specific gases from composting, so possibly I am way off here.
In my garden, there’s hordes of skeeters hanging out within most of the plants and stacks of dead stalks/leaves I toss into a pile nearby. If I so much as breathe into an ‘infested’ plant (squash/zucchini particularly!), the skeeters come out promptly - done it as an 'experiment of curiosity recently. These are definitely mostly, if not 100%, tiger-skeeters, too.
On preview, I agree that the areas of my hordes are both shaded and also ‘humid’ from keeping soil moistish (on average).
Missed edit window. Here is a page that speaks of attractants. Interesting that Limburger cheese is listed as one of few known attractants (as well as CO2 to some degree). Limburger, to me, is darn near compost-smelling!
How deep are you covering your compost? Books I’ve been reading lately seem to indicate that the stuff you throw on the compost pile should be covered in relatively-dry material like straw or leaves or grass clippings.
I have composted for years and never noticed this, but that could just be because we compost differently or live in different climates. It is interesting that the insecticide lowered the number of mosquitos. I doubt it would harm the microbes much. So any attractive odor from the pile should still be there. My guess is that your compost pile is just a good hang-out, but that is just a guess. You might want to cover your pile with some soil and see if that keeps the mosquitos at bay.