Death to mosquitoes — and here’s how

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I have some simple techniques to reduce the mosquito attacks in the home.

I have some simple techniques to reduce the mosquito attacks in the home.

Keep a spray bottle of Windex with ammonia handy, and when mosquitoes buzz you, spray them. They fall to the floor or ground usually where they can be either sprayed further or stomped. It also knocks flies out of the air or sends them to windows where they are trying to get out, and can be dispatched with extreme prejudice. Make sure you buy the glass cleaner with ammonia, as some don’t have ammonia in the mix.

Using a citronella candle in a metal bucket, leave it burning inside your house or lanai. When you also use a fan to move air slowly, it makes it harder for skeets to track your exhaled CO2 and smell to find you.

Incidentally, the citrus-based orange cleaners and degreasers are excellent bug and ant control, if you spray it directly on a cockroach, and coat its body. They breathe along the edges of their body, not mouth, and it will kill them. Good direct hit, they turn upside down and die quickly; fair hit and I would find them dead elsewhere. Nice, as it is a cleaner and disinfectant, rather than nasty poison which affects us as well. The orange cleaner degreaser also kills ants on contact and destroys their scent trails to food and water.

I find it at Home Depot and other retail outlets.

It smells decent as well. Better than splattered mess with swatter.

I used to live in Alaska where there are billions of mosquitoes, and we used a product called “buhach” powder, which was dried ground pyrethium flowers, toxic/repellent to skeets, but it is not available anymore. We would let it smolder like punk by the entry of a door, and the smoky haze would keep them at bay fairly well. There are still “coils” but many are poison.

Someone could find source for pyrethium flowers and start making a powder like buhach again, make some side money. I have other things going so pass the idea along.

Once in awhile, I would snap and take a deep breath and tense muscles where skeet was biting, and it couldn’t get loose, as I pulled it apart or at least removed wings. I am working on this vindictive trait with a counselor, as it doesn’t seem like proper behavior, however, was very satisfying in a perverse way. Lol.

Someone clever could invent a funnel shaped (spiral neck) device trap which emits CO2 and scent and draws in the skeets where they can not escape. Maybe a solar driven compressor to make small fish food tablets out of the buggahs. There’s gotta be new and clever ways to control or reduce their numbers other than widespread commerical poisons. More humans die from skeet related illness than other causes worldwide.

Hopefully this helps in our part of man’s constant struggle with his environment.

Jay Failing is a resident of Kau