How to build an effective mosquito trap

We wrote an article with different mosquito traps you can use. In the years since then, mosquitoes became an even bigger problem, spreading viruses like Zika in tropical climates.

advanced mosquito trap one way

Insecticides are regularly sprayed to get rid of the mosquitoes, but insecticides always have undesirable side-effects, like the harm they can cause to our health. There are safer solutions out there that work too.

Ovitraps

The trap we’ll show you is a type of ovitrap. Ovitraps are designed to resemble the preferred breeding ground of mosquitoes, to capture mosquitoes that have already bitten people and now carry eggs they’re hoping to deposit. Mosquitoes without Borders came up with a simple low-cost Ovitrap design that you can build in your own home. We will show you how.

The one-way mosquito trap

Take a look at this design:

advanced mosquito trap one way

This net is placed into a bottle. The mosquito enters from the left. It climbs over the ramp to end up in the bottle. The problem for the mosquito however, is that when it gets in, it has no way of getting out again! The mosquito ends up stuck in the bottle you insert the net into. Below the net is the stagnant water that the mosquito deposits its larvae in.

Here you can see the full design:

mosquito bottle trap

You can easily set up these traps around your house yourself. The designers have put up a free guide demonstrating how to set up this mosquito trap yourself. You can find their DIY ovitrap design here!

Instructions on how to build the one-way mosquito trap

Materials needed

-A plastic bottle to place the trap in.

-Scissors

-A metal wire

-Aluminum screen or comparable material. It looks like this.

-A toilet roll or something similar to roll the screen around

-Duct tape

advanced mosquito trap step one

Step 1: You start out by rolling the screen around the roll, as seen here in the image. You need the screen to be rolled at least two layers thick.

mosquito trap duct tape

Step 2: Use duct tape to keep the screen together. Remove the screen from the roll you used.

Step 3: Cut the back end of the trap open into multiple pieces, so that it looks like this. This will serve to keep the trap stuck in your bottle.

mosquito trap ramp upwards

Step 4: Push up the inner layer of the front part of your screen, to create a ramp, as you can see in the image above here. The mosquito will walk up this ramp to get into the bottle, but won’t be able to get back through again.

Step 5: Now you need to get a bottle and outlay the trap you built over the bottle, to figure out the hole you need to cut to fit your trap in. After you cut out the hole, you can fit the trap in. When it fits, you trap should be complete!

The final result will look something like this:

mosquitos without borders trap complete

 

Did this go too fast for you? Well, watch the video below to see the whole thing again:

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