I have a very long bed of ivy that runs parallel to the side of my house. Due to the huge amount of rain we’ve had this summer, it is infested with mosquitoes. Every time I open my door, more mosquitoes come inside. At any given time there are 5 or 8 in our house.
I have had enough.
The Ivy grows on a bed that rests on a retaining wall made from railroad ties. Also living in/around this bed is a family of chipmunks, a bunch of small green lizards, the occasional garden snake, and a family of skinks. There’s also a proliferation of shiny black and bright yellow spiders that make enormous webs.
I want to spray the entire ivy bed down with something to get rid of the mosquitoes. But, I don’t want to hurt the ivy, the lizards, or the chipmunks. I don’t care about the spiders. I know, I know…they should be helping to control the mosquitoe population, right? They don’t seem to be helping one bit and if they have to go with the parasites, that’s fine.
Bats eat a lot of insects, including mosquitoes. “Bats are very advantageous in this way, one bat can eat roughly 600-1,000 mosquitoes and other insect pests each HOUR in our backyard.”
I was picturing bats flying around the house instead of mosquitos. True, it’s hard for me to picture mouthbreathers house so I just substituted my house for his/hers. It still was funny.
Actually, we occasionally do see bats at night around the yard… But, I am not going to put up a bathouse. The mosquito problem will not be an issue most summers, this one has just been especially rainy. I don’t want bats flying around my house for eternity because of one rainy summer. And I wouldn’t feel right about putting a bathouse up for three months and then taking it down once summer ended. Plus, I am a lazy turd. I am thinking more along the lines of insecticide that won’t hurt plants/mammals/reptiles. Does such a thing exist? I’ve never used anything other than Raid before.
G-Unit, thanks for the suggestion–I’ve heard those things work well. But I think the odds of me spending $250 on a machine like that is about as likely as me erecting a bathouse.
I was hoping for a cheap chemical answer. If worse comes to worst, I will just wait it out…summer is almost over.
Fight fire with fire!. (But killer mosquitoes are really only effective on islands and other restricted situations.)
mouthbreather, you probably only have a few more weeks of mosquito season to endure. In the meantime, check your gutters and other places that mosquitoes might breed. Here are some suggestions for mosquito control (first link for homeowners). Along with gutters, birdbaths, buckets, rainbarrels and anything else that can hold even small amounts of water can breed mosquitoes. If you find that you don’t have any standing water on your property, then it’s possible that the mosquitoes are coming off-property. Time to call your county mosquito control agency. They should come to trap to see which mosquitoes are there (not all require control) and where they might be breeding.
And just a note about bats - the studies that cite large numbers of mosquitoes being eaten by bats are done by placing bats in rooms with a large number of mosquitoes. Not surprisingly, the bats eat the mosquitoes. It’s less clear when bats are given a choice between a fat, juicy moth and a skinny mosquito under natural conditions. Regardless, I do encourage people to use bats house for the shear joy of bat conservation.