Mosquito Trap Reviewed

I wrote this article for Mango Dreams, our volunteer newsletter, so I thought that I would reprint it here.

Of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, the mosquito has to be the least popular. It is easy to understand how this is so, for various kinds of irritation and disease follow the little vampires wherever they go. As many of us know, their bite can be the cause of several scary diseases found in this part of world. I myself suffered from a bout of Dengue Fever last December, which has made me much more paranoid about being bitten. For many nights, I lay awake inside my mosquito net thinking about how I could reduce the mosquito population in my room. “Surely,” I thought to myself, “there has to be a way of building a device that would trap the vile devils. A veritable mosquito trap, if you will.” While trying to design such a thing myself, I sought advice from a phrase said by an old religion professor of mine during my days at university. In response to a very difficult question posed to him student, he said to us, “There are many questions about the universe that are very difficult to answer. The only course of action is to ask God. But you can always do the next best thing; you can ask Google™.” I asked the search engine giant for advice about how to build a mosquito trap, and sure enough I found what I was looking for.

There are essentially two kinds of mosquito traps. The first is the kind that you have to buy, and the second is the kind you can make at home. What is similar about both kinds is that they operate using the same basic principle. Mosquitoes are attracted to heat, carbon dioxide, stagnant water, and darkness; the first two for when the mosquito needs to feed, and the second two for them to hide and reproduce. When a human or animal is nearby, a mosquito can locate its position by the carbon dioxide and the heat it emits. The perfect distraction for them would be for you to take a giant water buffalo and put it in your room so that the mosquitoes would bite the buffalo and not you. However, since a water buffalo is not known to be most gracious of houseguests, you can recreate the conditions that would attract the mosquitoes to the buffalo. There are several companies that sell industrial mosquito traps that do just that sort of thing. Most emit low levels of carbon dioxide, emit heat, and emit a chemical that mimics the smell of breath that mosquitoes can detect. The mosquitoes then fly near the emitters, and are sucked into a space where they die. While these machines are mostly very expensive, there is a contraption you can build that more or less does the same thing for a fraction of what the commercial variety costs.

I found the instructions for this trap on a website named http://www.diyhappy.com/quick-and-dirty-mosquito-trap/ . It said that the idea originated from a class science project in Taiwan. The materials you need to build this trap are as follows: an empty two-liter bottle of soda, scissors, black paper, tape, sugar, water, and yeast. All of the items are things you should be able to find in your local markets except for the yeast, which can be found at Lucky Market™ for fewer than three dollars. This is how you build the trap:

1. Cut off the top of the bottle above the wrapper so that you have two pieces: a jar-like piece, and a funnel like piece.
2. Next, add 200ml of water to bottle (about a fifth of the bottle).
3. Add 50 grams of sugar (about two spoonfuls of sugar) to the water, and stir it so that it dissolves.
4. Add 1 gram of yeast, about a half of spoonful, to the mixture. CO2 will be produced when the yeast mixes with the sugar and ferments. This will make it smell like a beer, but the odor is not very strong.
5. Take the funnel part of the bottle that you cut up and fit into the bottle with the top facing down. Seal the edges with tape so that the CO2 is only released through the downward facing top of the bottle.
6. Either wrap the bottle in black paper, or put it in a dark place. The mosquitoes will be attracted to the carbon dioxide and the darkness, and will be trapped inside the bottle. They cannot escape because once they go in, they cannot find their way out. They are just that smart.


Give the trap a few days before it really starts working. I noticed that it was much more effective if I put it inside a bag or any place where I was always killing mosquitoes with my electrified tennis racket. Also, darker places will catch more mosquitoes than those with more light.

Making these traps can also be a fun activity you can do with your students. I told my classes that if they brought an empty plastic water bottle to the special class in the afternoon, I would provide water, sugar, and yeast. We discussed the dangers of Dengue and Malaria as well as general mosquito control techniques before we made the traps as a fun kind of activity.

Try it out for yourselves, but just remember that this is not a cure-all for preventing mosquito bites. Bug spray, protective clothing, and nets still need to be used, but consider this as another weapon in your arsenal against mosquitoes. Fortunately, most of us will hopefully not share the sentiment left by one person on the message board of the website where I found this: “If only I knew about this when I was in the Peace Corps. I wouldn’t have lost so much blood…”