Making mosquito buckets for your backyard

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, mosquitoes love me. I learned about these mosquito buckets sometime last year and made two of them for our backyard this year to give them a try, and the early results seem promising—my wife has been out there doing backyard gardening stuff for sometimes an hour or two at a time over the past month and reports that she’s hardly been bothered by any so far, in contrast to the typical clouds of them that might normally be out there by this time of year.

The gist is: Get a 5-gallon bucket, put water and a few handfuls of leaves/grass in there, and add a quarter of a Mosquito Dunk, which contains a (nontoxic, animal-safe) bacteria that kills mosquito larvae. Then just drop in a new quarter every 30 days or so. (More details on making them are at the linked site.) The mosquitoes will find the bucket and think it looks like a perfect place to lay their eggs, but the larvae won’t make it out as new mosquitoes. If you live in a place with mosquitoes and want to cut down on the number inhabiting your yard in the summer, these seem worth a go.