I've heard that too. But, from my experience, it's mostly insecticides: people want mosquito-free and flea-free (and ants, roaches etc) yards, and spray/spread poison that kills them. Unfortunately, it kills everything. I cancelled my yard service and noticed that birds started coming back, chasing the food supply. Butterflies cover my lantana, and I see fireflies at night.

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AuryGlenz 4 days ago | parent [-]

I live in Minnesota and the struggle is tough. Either my yard is completely unenjoyable for the family due to mosquitoes and deer flies some years or I kill 50 insects that I don’t want for every one that I do.

I put up deer fly traps every year and that helps, but this year in particular has been awful for both them and mosquitoes. Luckily for the bugs my sprayer is broken and I haven’t had time to fix it.

I deliberately avoid the place on our property where fireflies are, on the years that I do spray. We really need a better solution.

Just to be clear, if we go outside right now we instantly have multiple deer flies trying to land on us and bite, which is only a distraction for the mosquitoes. Without swatting I’d probably get a mosquito bite a minute midday or maybe 5-10 a minute at 7pm.

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goda90 3 days ago | parent [-]

You can target mosquitoes more directly with mosquito dunks. It's a block of dehydrated bacteria that produces a toxin believed to only impact the larva of mosquitoes, fungus gnats, and black flies. Basically you make sure all standing water in the area is drained or has a mosquito dunk in it. You can make buckets full of yard debris and water and a mosquito dunk to attract mosquitoes to lay their eggs that then get killed.

You can also try to increase the number of predators. Create habitats for bats, dragonflies, mosquito larva eating fish, etc.

I've found picaridin lotion to be much less annoying than DEET spray but still effective this year.

	▲	AuryGlenz 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I’ve used mosquito dunks experimentally but we have a pond behind our house and in front of it, and a lake nearby. It’s Minnesota, after all. I did try to chuck some dunks into the ponds but they have a lot of cattails in the way so I was unsure if they even made it in the water. Our attic was such a good habitat for bats we had to do something about it ;). But we’re also surrounded by woods.