Soda Bottle Mosquito Trap - Open Roads Radio forum for Ham, Amateur Radio and RV camping

Radio · 04-13-2013, 07:53 AM

Here's some instructions going around about how to make a mosquito trap out of things you might have laying around the camp.

HOMEMADE MOSQUITO TRAP.

Items needed:

200 ml water
50 grams of brown sugar
1 gram of yeast
2-liter plastic bottle

Or US conversion:
1 cup of water
1/4 cup of brown sugar

HOW:
1. Cut the plastic bottle in half.
2. Mix brown sugar with hot water. Let cool. When cold, pour in the bottom half of the bottle.
3. Add the yeast. No need to mix. It creates carbon dioxide, which attracts mosquitoes.
4. Place the funnel part, upside down, into the other half of the bottle, taping them together if desired.
5. Wrap the bottle with something black, leaving the top uncovered, and place it outside in an area away from your normal gathering area. (Mosquitoes are also drawn to the color black.)

Some debate over effectiveness. If you change the "bait" then it will trap such things as wasps and yellow jackets with ordinary lemonade. I don't know that mosquitoes are attracted to black, but wrapping the trap in black plastic or paper would tend to keep it warm, and skeeters definitely like warm things that give of CO2 (that'd be us)

You will want this and those electric bug zappers AWAY from camp a bit, as insects are DRAWN toward them. I had an electric bug zapper I had to move 100 ft. from the house to escape the cloud of skeeters and such that it attracted, but the back deck was bug free.

I'm going to make one of these this summer just to see if it works.