Mosquito Repeller

No, I think purple martins only eat mosquitoes ;-)

-Chuck Harris

======= "...While bats and purple martins are excellent insect eaters, their effect against mosquitoes is minimal. They spend a large amount of the time feeding on larger insects, like moths and beetles. Whipporwills and poor-wills are nighttime birds that do eat a tremendous number of mosquitos, eating more in one night than a purple martin does in a lifetime..."

bats are perfectly harmelss, mr. thompson. levae them alone.

effect

feeding

are

more in

That's sure enough what it says, but I think that statement speaks for itself. A "lifetime"..... I somehow find that hard to believe. I live on the banks of a south texas bayou, believe me when I say that I'm glad that I regularly see many scores of martins flitting overhead right after the sun drops over the horizon. They're eating something, and I'm quite sure that I know what is the most plentiful bug around my backyard.

I would agree that the single most effective way to control mosquitoes is to ruin their breeding grounds wherever possible.

Less like grounds and more like water. Drain all the containers of stagnant water and put mosquito fish in the places that can't be drained.

Dark

mosquitoes

Yeah! You gotta problem with that?? >:-I More than a half million hits in google, and here's the first one with all the info you would ever want, including links to even more info.

Heck yes, bigtime even in upstate Pennsylvania and nearby parts of New York state, in parts of Massechussets, and much of Wisconsin, plenty other places in the Frostbelt, as well as the more subtropical/semitropical parts of the eastern 60%. Ever hear of yellow fever being a problem in the past in Philadelphia? How about the West Nile virus - recently becoming a bit of a mosquito-borne threat in the US? Ever hear of people buying "bug zappers" hoping to zap mosquitoes? Ever see how many citronella candles sell in the US?

Heck, there is a region in Alaska that has (during their brief summer) a HUGE mosquito problem, since mosquitoes managed to survive there but none of their natural enemies do! Go outdoors there with uncovered skin during the season, and you get swarms of mosquitoes waiting for unocupied feeding space on your skin!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com) - bitten in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Orlando, and upstate Pennsylvania!

I have looked a bit at what meteorological literature has to say about Phoenix in the mid and late summer - not truly arid, but appearing to me to qualify as semiarid, even with enough moisture for a Philadelphian to notice some humidity! Heck, an average July in Phoenix managed somehow to "officially" average about 3 inches of rain, which is almost as much rain as an average month in Philadelphia! Along with humidity around 25-30% at the time of day with highest temperature, higher at other times of the day, around or over 70% at dawn- maybe closer to 50-60% in downtown Phoenix where it cools less at night. Philadelphia or Washington DC during a heatwave has relative humidity usually around 40-50% at the time of day that has the highest temperature (and 80-90% relative humidity during breakfast time). Ever hear of the monsoon season that a significant portion of Arizona has - there is such a thing!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

(Chuck Harris wrote this)

I have been there before - found it to be quite a biased site.

They even had junk science of their own - at one point they claimed that rising temperature measurements at official weather stations were from trees growing taller over the years.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Heard about them...

Supposedly much more effective than the traps that use UV lights, but that can easily harvest merely drops in the bucketloads of the mosquito population. Biting mosquitoes are not attracted much to UV lamps.

At least the CO2 traps do not trap lacewings, which are attarcted by the UV-based traps and which are a significant enemy of aphids.

----------------------------------------------------

One insect that I noticed easily trapped by blacklight and blue lights - leafhoppers. Leafhoppers are harmful to plants, but I don't hear about them being some intolerable scourge. But flying leafhoppers may serve some good - feeding and attracting bats. One summer many years ago I tried deploying a large homebrew UV/blue lamp based bugzapper on my block in the spring mating season of the year's first brood of leafhoppers. It appears that I put a dent in my block's population of leafhoppers that lasted into the early summer. My block ran low on bats that summer, and that July was if anything a little worse than an average July for mosquitoes.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Florida is entirely outside the tropics, although part of it has a climate that qualifies as tropical.

Then again, the climate type usually called "Warm Humid Continental" is sometimes called "Humid Subtropical", and includes by and large the portion of the USA's "Northeast Corridor" along and southeast of Route 1 as far north as Boston! New York City qualifies as "Humid Subtropical"! Then again again, mosquitoes flourish in many areas of the USA that are "cool humid continental"!

A few nasty cold days in some especially cold winters in Philadelphia in the early and mid 1980's had temperatures as cold as -7 degrees F (-22 degrees C) - did that free Philadelphia of mosquitoes? How about -40 degrees (or a little colder) in Wisconsin? Small insects manage to have some individuals make it through awfully cold temperatures, and ever notice how rapidly they can multiply once conditions get favorable again...

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

And the research you've done shows that this isn't true? There is an additional factor, and that is the encroaching civilization near the weather stations that were formerly in the boonies. Ever notice the tremendous number of remote access weather stations that are placed along the major interstates? Think the heat blown off by the cars and trucks might have an effect on the average temperature seen there?

I was reading one research paper that showed that the average temperatures seen by global satellites were actually dropping.

-Chuck Harris

(1) The Phoenix area averages 6"-7" of rain for the YEAR. Typically it rains in July-August and January-March. However some of these recent strange winter storms have dipped south into AZ, giving *lots* of snow up north, and a week's worth of drizzle here in PHX a few weeks ago.

(2) The 25-30% humidity you quote only happens *during* a summer storm, 2-3 total on July-August.

(3) I don't know where you got your humidity numbers for DC, but I was born there, and it's hell on wheels in the summer.

...Jim Thompson

We began using a Brewer's Yeast tablet once a day in 2000, and I'll bet we haven't had more then a dozen mosquito bites total to date. AND, that includes a summer trip to Alaska!

bet

Man, I started this thread and asked why I'm still able to purchase these things nearly two years after they were supposed to stop make these claims. but it says right on t he poackage, "Repels mosquitos from your personal space."

But this thread has been going on and on, without a single bit on the original topic, which was electronic repellers. Yeah, there were CO2, yada yada repellers. That's not what I was expecting.

As for brewers yeast, I thought that was rreally heavy with vitamin Bs, and if you get too much niacin, you turn into 'pink skin'. Andorrians ought to like that. ;-)

Hi Watson,

Perhaps we don't know? Perhaps the distribution stream was saturated with the little buggers, and the FTC rule only prohibited deceptive labeling on new units? What is the manufacture date on the units you bought? Knowing that they don't work, why did you buy them?

-Chuck Harris

"Watson A.Name - "Watt Sun, the Dark Remover"" wrote in

Somebody already said that the restriction was qualified by this clause: "unless they have competent and reliable scientific evidence to support the claims". It would appear that Lentek is in posession of such evidence since their website is currently violating everything in the restriction.

Most products are not 100% effective, why should Lentek's be required to be any different? I've never experimented on mosquitos with ultrasound to see if it "repels" them. It's not entirely unreasonable to think that the mosquitos may be sensitive to the sound vibrations of a natural predatory enemy and wish to leave the vicinity, this is the claim that I've seen others make about it. Perhaps, by subjecting mosquitos to several hundred dB of ultrasound at the proper frequency, Lentek was able to demonstrate some effectiveness to their methods. ;-)

There are many forms of snake-oil available these days, just look at the common audiophool. ;-)

Bs,

the

CO2,

Says Made in China, but I can't find any indication of a date. Says US EPA EST NO 72092-CHN-001 on it.

I bought it for its collectible value. Someday they won't be around. And I can always use it for an ultrasonic tone generator. ;-)

clause:

support

I didn't see anything on their website about these ultrasonic repellers.

to

They are not expected to be 100% effective. All they have to do is demonstrate scientifically that they do have some capability to repel, but apparently they couldn't even do that much. My experience was that someone gave me a cockroach repeller that they had in their kitchen, and I opened it up and found that the roaches had lived inside very comfortably. :-( It was made by "Panasony"!

natural

This thing runs on a couple button cells, and can't make that much power.