Each summer Lorraine Thompson looks out her window at the patio around her house. It would be a great place to enjoy the summer, if it
wasn’t for the mosquitoes.
Thompson and her husband hope an $800 trap called the Mosquito Magnet will attract enough mosquitoes to allow them to enjoy the patio in peace.
“You can’t sit out there without getting eaten to death,” said Thompson, who lives in Rosalind, Alta.
The Mosquito Magnet looks like a giant mix master attached to a propane tank. It shoots a mixture of carbon dioxide and a lure to attract and trap mosquitoes, no-see-ums, black flies and sand flies within a half to one-acre area.
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If the Mosquito Magnet works, Thompson will move it around the farmyard to ward off mosquitoes in her garden while she works there.
“We’ll see if they do work,” she said.
Down the road, her neighbour, Chittra Campbell, also coughed up the money for a Mosquito Magnet to keep the yard mosquito free.
Campbell said she doesn’t know if it works, but it’s an inexpensive investment compared to farming.
“For us, we lose more money on the farm than 800 bucks,” she said.
Robbin Lindsay, a Health Canada research scientist, said people are even more eager to control mosquitoes now that West Nile virus has arrived in Canada.
But Lindsay doesn’t believe the high-priced gadgets are better than a $5 bottle of DEET.
Lindsay said a University of Manitoba student studied the Mosquito Magnet’s effectiveness in Winnipeg. The student stood in a yard beside the device and counted the number of mosquitoes that bit her. She then went to another area with no Mosquito Magnet and counted the mosquito bites.
“The student got just as many bites standing beside the Mosquito Magnet as when she was not standing beside one,” he said.
“When push comes to shove, most of them only show a moderate reduction in numbers. The Mosquito Magnets, no question, do collect a large number of mosquitoes, and intuitively people think that eventually you would have some removal effect and eventually they would be gone, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
It’s similar with the electronic bug zappers that attract the insects with ultraviolet light and then kill them in an electrical current. Studies show a person standing in a yard with a zapper gets just as many bites as in a yard without one.
The cheapest and best way to ward off mosquitoes is still long-sleeved shirts and pants and DEET, he said.
Canada has about 80 species of mosquitoes. The early season mosquitoes biting now don’t spread West Nile. It’s not usually until late July that there is enough buildup of the disease to be a concern.
