How to Kill Mosquitoes

My routine of checking this mornings email turned into a full blown blog post – Thanks to Jay.

Hey TG, here’s another one to add to your mosquito trap that I sent to you last year.  It sounds as tho if everyone on the island would buy a bottle of Listerine and make a trap, you could eliminate all of those pesky creatures on the island.  Wouldn’t that be nice? I hope all is well in the land of sunshine and sand.  Aloha from Thailand,   J

First thing I do when I get info like this is go to my best friend Google [actually my toolbar got switched to Bing no idea how]. I ran a search on ‘does Listerine kill mosquitoes’ and here are 3 interesting things I found.

1. Nice thought but just as I suspected snopes gave a false right away to this email chain. According to them it is the female mosquitoes we need to worry about and the reason is that they are attracted to carbon dioxide. The more a person emits the more likely they are to be under attack by the female blood suckers.  Mosquito repellants like Deet and picardin work not so much for the kill factor but because they jam the odor receptors in insect antennae and mask odors that would ordinarily attract the bloodsucking bugs.

2. A Florida resident explains a bit about the theory behind the possibility of using mouthwash as insecticide. Since Listerine contains a fair amount of alcohol, spraying it directly onto mosquitoes will likely kill them, but not very efficiently. The alcohol could kill either by excessive intoxication, dehydration, or the fact that an alcohol solution has lower surface tension than water, which could wick through an insect’s spiracles into the trachea and drown them. [Death by Alcohol – unfortunately not the first time I have seen this idea come to pass.]

3. Best voted answer on Yahoo answers.
How would you go about killing mosquitoes with Listerine?
Spit it on them in mid-flight? lol

Here are my favorite tried and true ways to help keep the pesky buggers away?

Inside the house Vape wins hands down for me. You can find the plug-in device and boxes of replaceable cartridges known as Vape Mats in many grocery stores here on Ambergris Caye.

Vape Mat is easy to use and lasts up to 12 hours.  Each mat has three holes in it which slowly releases the insecticide when plugged in. Its time to use a new mat when you notice a color change from blue to white. In addition to skeeters it works a charm on pesky no-see-um’s when they are bad enough be unwanted house guests.

The only drawback is that you have to pay attention as it is a plug in device. Not sure what happens if you leave it plugged in over 12 h without changing the mat and not looking to find out.

Mosquito coils  are great too and I sometimes burn them outside on our veranda to help keep them at bay. If skeeters are really bad I will spray the screen door with bug stuff.

p.s I have been meaning to give totals on our last few BEL electric bills – April $83.06 – May $94.31 – June $105.59 – prices are in Belize dollars. We do not use air con and sometimes have ceiling fans going. Our main power use is computers, lights, tv and electric stove. I am determined to get it down a bit more since I learned that our friends who live in a condo close by come in around the $60 range – missing the days of $50 Belize electric bills when we lived in town.