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How are you dealing with mosquitoes and flies?
The news has been talking about the burst of mosquito activity, thanks to warm weather and moisture everywhere. In our typically bug-free home, we've lately been swatting a half dozen flying insects a day, mostly flies and fruit flies, and a mosquito here and there.
I'm not necessarily scared of West Nile, Eastern equine encephalitis, or dengue virus, but I'm wondering if anyone has any good tricks for dealing with all these bugs.
How are you dealing with mosquitoes and flies at home?
A secret weapon for flying bugs is a spray bottle with soapy water in it. The soap breaks surface tension, the water bogs down their wings, and a droplet landing on them will ground them. Even works for things like wasps.
And you probably don’t mind getting soapy water on things.
Yes! Any time our indoor compost caddy gets infested with fruit flies I chase them around the kitchen with standard cleaning spray. Shooting them out of the air is immensely satisfying, and squishing them and wiping up the excess liquid is just cleaning.
I live in a village and our neigbour has goats in their garden. There are so much flies in the summer you wouldn't believe it. Also - this summer we had some strange weather that spawned lots of mosquitos.
You can't really do anything with the flies. We have nets in the windows that keep them away but we want to go and be outside and some always slip in. Add kids always wanting to be on the other side of the door meaning the door is more open than closed... And when you finally sit outside flies keep landing on you all the time. You can't even have coffee with some cake or pie as this is like calling them in on a party. You can't really do anything with this. I had fly traps at one point that trapped 200+ flies per day and still nothing changed.
Mosquitos are worse this year. You can't be out near the pool after 17/18 o'clock because they would eat you alive. Pool is above ground and with perfectly clean water, yet they fly around all evening. Again - I don't know what to do with them. I don't even think the blue zap zap light would do anything during daytime.
Do you have access to magnetic screen doors? Might be a nice addition to the house for the kids. Also hands free path for walking outside with stuff.
https://a.co/d/941nnIw
My dad makes those magnetic screen doors (and blinds). He actually advises people against them and seeing my neigbour having one, I can tell why. The thing is we have so many flies that they land on the door itself and when you open it, they just fly from the frame right into the house. The best thing to do is to wave your hand around the door before you open it which makes them fly away temporarily.
Oh interesting, that's not fun. Good luck with the insect challenges!
I"m quite used to it, to be honest. It can bother you only so much. If it's unbearable, we can stay inside. Whoch we do here and there due to how hot it is outside anyway.
The worst species of Mosquito in my part of the US is the invasive Aedes Aegypti, they can reproduce in damp leaf litter and still water. They are aggressive and will fly a lot farther than native species.
I live in an old, heavily wooded neighborhood. To combat them I've done a lot of landscaping on my 1 acre lot. I removed all the underbrush, filled in any areas that collected water, removed a bunch of invasive species like English Ivy) then put down a very thick layer of wood mulch. This has led to a large reduction in the mosquitoes around my house, I've tried encouraging my neighbors to do the same, but no luck yet.
Any time I open the door a number of gnats/no-see-ums/fruit flies/non-descript bitey annoying bugs or a mix of all of the above silently get in the house (or grab onto me and make their way in that way). I've had a lot more trouble with them this year than any previous year.
However what has reduced their numbers for me successfully has been getting those UV/blue-light traps that have the blue sticky cartridges. Those have worked wonders (if you're okay with treating insects that way, I understand some people have reservations) when nothing else did.
Wouldn't work on large mosquitos though probably. Thankfully those haven't been bad in my area this year. I also did a Bifenthrin (Talstar-P) application to my decks and perimeter, and honestly I should have done a second one. But it works wonders- but is indeed a residual pesticide and a "commercial" strength kind of thing. For me and my fear of wasps/hornets and having tons of biting bugs around- it was necessary for me to keep them to a minimum and it worked great. I tried to be somewhat minimal/choosy in my application to avoid killing good bees and such, but it's a trade-off I decided to make.
I'll second those blue light traps. They work a treat, as do vinegar traps. I'll also add that for outdoor spaces thermacell dispersal units work well in still air.
I've done the UV traps, but took t=em down after zapping too many bees. If you set a timer for highest mosquito activity and keep it far from other pollinator food it might go better.
I only use UV traps indoors (they're non-zapping ones, just sticky), so flies/similar small insects that get in the house get caught by those.
Generally don't have issues with bees/wasps getting indoors anyway. I don't use any typical outdoor "bug zapper" types of things. IMO those a lot of the time attract more insects than would otherwise be around anyway.
For outdoors, my main go-to was the 1-2x per season Bifenthren broadcast application around areas I want to reduce activity (while staying away from anything remotely close to food and flowers and such).
I'm never outdoors long enough to need any other particular type of bug reduction, though.
I'm really sensitive to mosquito and flea bites, and for some ungodly reason, we have an infestation of drugstore beetles coming in from our balcony (like 100% that's where they're coming from, we cleaned out our pantry and everything, and they keep coming). We've been using Zevo, and when we had a rogue flea who escaped our pup's skin to attack me, we wet insane and cleaned literally everything on the hottest water possible, including our bed and vacuumed it. Thankfully, I've only had to deal with a few mosquitos, but I kill them on sight.
I work in pest control and the In2Care traps for mosquitoes are pretty cool!
The mosquitoes land in the trap and lay their larva in the water. The water has a larvicide in it to ensure they don't mature. The adult mosquito picks up the larvicide and a fungus on their body. They then spread the larvacide to other small bodies of water around your home and the neighborhood whenever they land to lay more eggs. Those eggs won't mature, any other eggs laid by other mosquitoes also won't mature. Then the fungus kills the mosquito in about 3 days.
There is so little fungus and larvacide used that even the water in the trap is safe to drink.
I’ve had good results with a couple fly trap bags like this. You just add water to activate the bait, then hang it up from someplace like a tree branch. Needs to be replaced every month or so. You won’t believe how many flies it catches! It does get kinda stinky and attracts flies to it, so hang it away from your building.
As for mosquitoes, I’ve heard really good things about mosquito dunks (BTI larvacide). I bought some but haven’t actually put them to use yet.
I'll +1 the mosquito dunks, though its too late for everyone entering the fall. This is an early-spring activity... 1 dead mosquito in April prevents millions from being born.
I made a honeypot: Filled a 5 gallon bucket of water 2/3 full, threw in a dunk, placed it next to the house to prevent rain from overflowing it. Did that in Aprilish. I have a 1/4 acre lot and the bucket is roughly in the center, my mosquito population is a fraction of what it was last year. I made sure to throw a gallon of water in it periodically to insure the gross, stagnant deathbucket remains liquid.
Our cricket population is way up this year, so fingers crossed some more predators next year.
Good tip, thanks! I’ll hold onto these for next season.
Mosquito dunks are also pretty good for fungus gnats (fruit fly-like gnats that often are a problem for potted plants). Adding mosquito dunks to the water I used for my plants was really effective when I had a bad fungus gnat problem.
I thought I was the only one.
I've tried electric fly swatter, sticky glue traps near/on windows, sticky glue traps with the UV light, apple cider vinegar and dish soap traps, citronella incense, mint/eucalyptus/citrus/lavendar chapstick to keep them off my face, and even my cats are (playfully) swatting them down. I'm at my wit's end because they keep showing up as if nothing happened. I'll try the soapy water in a spray bottle next, like someone suggested here. Please, keep the ideas coming.
I wonder if an army of frogs would even be overwhelmed. Lol
You'll end up eith another problem
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia#Ecological_effects
A shot glass with some rum in the bottom, covered with plastic wrap with a few holes poked in it. That takes care of many of the flies.
Mosquitoes I just swat.
A similar trick that works wonders for gnats and fruit flies is a jar with vinegar in it with plastic wrap with holes on top. Haven't had much trouble with either on the US west coast but they were a force to be contended with out east.
What I've done is use a cup of apple cider vinegar with a little bit of dish soap in it, the soap prevents them either from swimming or flying out of it (can't remember which)
The soap apparently breaks the surface tension so they can't fly off and just drown.
I live in an apartment but a mesh screen has been a gamechanger. I'm partial to this one, which costs more than alternatives but can also stand up to the heat of the sun beating down on my apartment door (adhesive mounted ones fail). Since investing in it, mosquito bites have become exceptionally rare.
In general, I trust anti-mosquito tips from this guy local to me: https://colinpurrington.com/fighting-mosquitoes/
In specific, I started using autocidal gravid ovitraps, which attract mosquitoes trying to lay eggs in water and both prevent successful egg-laying and capture/kill the female adults: https://jawns.club/@skyfaller/112922774998077733
They got off to a slow start, I thought they weren't working, then they picked up speed and I now consider them a success. Possible causes of the slow start include the new plastic smell repelling the mosquitoes at first, or the weather (perhaps once we hit a dry spell my traps were the only water left). Contrary to expectations, the trap I put in the barren back alley was much more successful than the one in the front where my garden is, perhaps because the alley is on the shady side of the house. I don't really understand it because I get bit just as often in the front of my house, the mosquitoes are clearly present in the front/garden.
My UV-Light tape catcher has been working overtime for a week. https://i.imgur.com/UYISAhP.jpeg
These are fruitflies that do not seem to care about anything else than jumping on screens, light-sources and me. Inspecting your earholes and diving to your nose. I also got a vinegar trap for them, but absolutely none of them wanted it.
Every evening they have been pouring in from every airway of the house. Pushing through nets and somehow even allergy-cloths.
For the vinegar trap, make sure it's apple cider vinegar specifically and only use a small amount of dish soap. Place in an area they like. For me, it's around the garbage, bread, fruit, and kitchen drain.
Good tip. I actually tried making my own vinegar trap first, i used a wrong kind of vinegar as none of the 7 instruction sites bothered to mention about it.
This latest one was a complete product with it's own vinegar coctail.
These guys don't care about them it seems. These do no swarm around my bio-trash either like the usual fruitflies.
Might be fungus gnats rather than fruit flies if they're not attracted to the typical traps. I have some yellow sticky traps for fungus gnats from when I had them in my potted plants, and the fruit flies I'm currently dealing with aren't attracted to them even when I put them in places where there are a lot of them. Whereas they go ham on the apple cider vinegar traps. They're pretty hard to tell apart, but they behave ever so slightly differently.
I think one of them has a super skinny abdomen, and the other is more fat, right? iirc, the fungus ones are the skinny ones.
Edit: yeah, these suckers.
If there's a difference there, it's so small that I've never noticed it. I've heard there's a color difference with their heads or their eyes or something, but I don't remember the specifics. For me the biggest tell is just "are they infesting the houseplants", which is easy enough to tell by just noticing whether a bunch scatter from the soil when you water.
Our house is currently involved in a plague of fruit flies. We tried setting out apple cider vinegar traps and cleaning all the drains in case there was organic matter there that they were breeding in, but no luck so far. We've got fly paper out that catches a fraction of them too, but there's simply too many of them for it to make a dent. My only solace is that they aren't fungus gnats this time so my plants are all fine (though I was able to wipe out my last fungus gnat infestation relatively easily, whereas these guys keep multiplying, so maybe I'm not so lucky there...)
Luckily mosquitos haven't been too bad here so we've just got the one problem. I'll definitely be skimming the comments in this thread for anything I can try though.
I haven actually seen many of them. This heat wave has been so bad that it feels like maybe it killed them all when they went in daylight sun and instantly burst into fire.
Today was the last day of it, thankfully.
I covered one of the bedroom without with a mesh this summer, allows to keep the window opened at night.
If you are able to install fly screens on your windows, that would be my go to. I had some serious sleepless nights due to mosquito noise and tried out all sorts of repellents, but nothing worked as well as just blocking physical access via a screen.
Living somewhere where we simply just don't get as many mosquitoes. And not leaving open windows/doors (cause it's not like we don't have any mosquitoes, but they really are rare. Only time I've ever been bitten by one is when one slips through the open door but for some reason they are so rare I never get bitten outside by them.