How Dry Ice Can Come In Handy For Getting Rid Of Pesky Mosquitoes

Summertime is full of opportunities for outdoor activities, as long as you can keep pesky mosquitoes at bay. Patio barbecues, backyard games, and playing in the pool become considerably less fun when you're dealing with itchy, irritating bites. When it becomes too much to bear, we're forced to find clever solutions to reclaim our space. While a commercial repellent or a concoction to naturally repel mosquitoes should be your first choice to combat the swarms, you can also set up simple traps to draw mosquitoes away and give everyone some much-needed relief.

Numerous chemicals from our bodies help mosquitoes locate human food sources. Chief among them is the carbon dioxide we exhale. By setting up a CO2-releasing system, you'll have a lure to trap and/or kill mosquitoes before they reach you. Many products, like the DynaTrap Mosquito and Fly Trap ($66 on Amazon), use this principle, generating CO2 to bring mosquitoes into the kill zone.

You can also consider homemade CO2 traps. For example, a yeast and sugar-water mosquito trap will produce CO2, offering a practical foundation for a makeshift setup. Better still, dry ice will sublimate (turn from solid CO2 to gas) to create an even more potent attractant. A 2005 study published in Tropical Biomedicine study showed dry ice attracted over 200% more mosquitoes than a yeast-sugar mixture. Another 2008 study in the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association found it far more effective than CO2 sachets or octenol, another chemical in sweat and breath that mosquitoes love. With a few extra materials, you can easily use dry ice and a backyard trap to pull mosquitoes away.

You can find dry ice locally by searching for "dry ice suppliers" near you, but it may also be conveniently available at a supermarket. Penguin Brand Dry Ice offers a handy locator tool for grocery stores selling its bags of dry ice, which run roughly $2 to $3 per pound. To attract mosquitoes, dry ice will sit in a container outside, causing it to sublimate relatively quickly. A pound can sublimate in only a few hours in high temperatures. With that in mind, you should keep about 5 to 10 pounds of dry ice for this project (plus, you'll have extra for your patio cooler).

For your trap, you'll also need a cloth bag (preferably black, red, orange, or cyan, as mosquitoes are drawn to them), a portable bug zapper (like the PIC Solar Bug Zapper, only about $20 at The Home Depot), and gloves to handle the dry ice. Hang your trap far from where people congregate. Pick areas around trees and plants where mosquitoes live. Position your bug zapper and bag next to each other, and add dry ice to the bag. As mosquitoes near the bag, they'll encounter the zapper that will take them out.

Alternatively, you can pop holes in the bottom of a sealable plastic container and hang it over the zapper. The holes will filter CO2 out, coaxing mosquitoes to the trap. Use this setup with other homemade mosquito traps to keep your yard clear of pests so you can enjoy it to the fullest when summer arrives.