How to Control Mosquitoes in Your Home and In Your Yard

The summer is here and so are the bugs. Buzzing and biting you and your family and friends all while you’re just trying to enjoy the outdoors this summer. You’ve got so many nuisances flying around one might think you’ve got a mosquito franchise in the backyard.

These flying pests can cause itchy welts in the best-case scenarios and spread disease at the worst. They see you as a free dinner but the time has come to put this all to stop. There are plenty of ways to eliminate mosquitoes, you just need to step up and act fast. It’s about taking precautions, checking around the home to find the places that are attracting mosquitoes to your home and finding all of the infestations so you can destroy them.

Above all, once you get rid of these annoyances you want to take the necessary actions to keep them away for good. Fortunately, the actions you take now can be very effective for preventing your family from being exposed to this scourge. So, let’s take a look at the options you have at your disposal for ensuring that your summer is free of mosquitoes:

Standing Water

Any home that has an area where standing water might be located will very likely have some kind of mosquito problem. That’s because areas with standing water are breeding zones for mosquitoes. They are attracted to any kind of stagnant puddles or collected water whether it’s inside an empty flower pot, a birdbath, a bowl, etc. These pools of moisture can quickly become filled with mosquito eggs that will hatch and unleash swarms of mosquitoes on your unsuspecting family and guests.

So, step outside and take a good long look around your home. Do you see any such examples of standing water? If you do, dump them out and get rid of these receptacles entirely, if possible. Find as many of these standing water problems as you can and eliminate all of them quickly.

Clear Away the Trash

Let’s be indelicate here for a minute, but the cleanliness of your yard will have a tremendous impact on whether or not you are going to be fighting off mosquitoes. So how clean is your home? Do you keep a rather tidy home or is your yard and other areas of the exterior littered with all manner of debris and detritus?

Be honest with your assessment and you can be a lot more effective at reducing the potential proliferation of mosquitoes around your house. This about locating more standing water that you may not have been able to track down or simply felt wasn’t part of a problem. But when you have random trash and junk lying around, those items can also collect water. Old tires can have water inside of them. Old coffee cans, planters, anything that has walls and a bottom can have water inside of it.

One small pool of stagnant water can hold hundreds of thousands of mosquito eggs. When those eggs do hatch, the baby mosquitoes that emerge will grow into adults in just about a week. That’s right, one week from hatchling to full-grown mosquito attacking you and your loved ones.

However, if you are able to eliminate those stagnant pools of water, you can wipe out the breeding grounds and leave those mosquitoes with no place to lay their eggs. Which means you and your family are safer and a whole lot more comfortable to enjoy your home’s outdoor living spaces.

Mosquito dunk options

Sometimes you can’t eliminate every instance of standing or stagnant water that exists in your backyard. Swimming pools aren’t a problem due to the chlorine and other chemicals that are used to maintain those bodies of water. We’re talking about things like birdbaths or small ponds that are located near the home.

For situations like these, you can turn to mosquito dunks. These are forms of poison that can be dropped into the water that will kill any mosquitoes that enter the water. But while these can be deadly to the common mosquito, this type of poison will have no effect whatsoever on other forms of wildlife. Animals that drink from the pond or birds that splash around in the bird bath won’t even know the dunk has been placed in the water.

That’s because mosquito dunks are specially formulated to act on mosquitoes only. So, feel free to use a dunk in any pool of water that you can’t drain and you’ll be destroying the pests you want eradicated. Nothing else.