We've all heard the joke: the mosquito is [insert province/state]'s official bird. Here in Saskatchewan it's just short of being true, and quite frankly, I'd do anything short of hanging a big bucket of blood outside just to keep the pesky little critters off me. So you have to understand how intrigued I was when I read about this DIY mosquito trap.
I've mentioned Hammacher Schlemmer before because of the cool stuff they carry, and I'd seen this mosquito trap there long before I caught it on BoingBoing. My friend Wendy has a similar contraption called "Skeeter-Vac" in her backyard, which I believe she picked up at Costco. It runs on propane to generate the carbon dioxide, and, as far as I remember, it does a decent job of keeping the outdoors relatively mosquito free. But it's expensive, and I'd prefer to spend my hard-earned cash on slurpees during those sweltering summer days.
The instructions for building the DIY trap are very simple, and I was able to put one together in less than 30 minutes. The most time consuming part, especially if you're a perfectionist like me, is getting the water to 40 degrees Celsius. We already had most of the necessary materials lying around the house, so my total cost was $1 for two huge sheets of construction paper from Dollarama.
Although there's nothing preventing mosquitoes to come flying out of the bottle, they're thankfully too stupid to know that. The carbon dioxide apparently gives them direction into the bottle, but once inside there's nothing to provide them with direction out. I'll post in a week or so with what my results are: personally, I'm wondering how this stacks up against more natural solutions, like bats and dragonflies.
Link (via BoingBoing)
Edit Aug. 10/06: Well, I regret to inform everyone that this experiment has failed miserably. I did not catch a single mosquito, but I did catch three daddy longlegs, some kind of crazy-ass beetle, and half a bottle of dandelion seeds.
Final tally: Mosquitos 2, Deron 0.
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