I am Santelmo!

Environment Friendly Homemade Dengue Mosquito Trap

It’s been all over the news for the past few weeks. The number of cases are increasing at an alarming rate. Every year this is one of our country’s biggest problems. DENGUE VIRUS!

The season/weather isn’t even helping. With the constant rain, stagnant water can be found all over, and those are only the visible ones, there are also the hidden stagnant waters where more and more Dengue carrying mosquitoes are propagating.

There is only so much that we could do to stop the Dengue cases from increasing. At home we’ve started burning dead leaves, and wood to produce smoke that hopefully would drive the Dengue Mosquito a.k.a. the Aedes Aegypti away. But no matter how much smoke we make, we still find those pests inside our home and in our bedrooms.

(picture from Stanford.edu)

Inspired by Korea Environmental Technology and Industry Institute, I started to do a little research and discovered an environment friendly way of eliminating these pesky little blood suckers. I found instructions on how to make a home made mosquito trap by using empty plastic bottles, sugar, water and yeast.

With this—if the experiment is true—hopefully it would attract the mosquitoes by producing Carbon Dioxide and trap and drown them inside the bottles.

I’ve created two of these contraptions. I placed one in the dining area and one outside the bedrooms (hallway).

How to build a Mosquito trap?

Materials Needed:

Large soda bottle

50 gram brown sugar (5 grams = 1 tsp)

1 gram live yeast

Thermometer

Measuring bottle/cup

200ml hot water

Scissors/ cutting knife

Newspaper

Sticky tape

1. First you must cut the top of the bottle (try to measure it so it would fit upside down inside the bottle)

2. Mix/dilute the 200ml hot water in the measuring cup/bottle with the 50gram brown sugar. Before adding the Yeast, make sure that the water is warm and will not exceed 40 degrees Celsius (use the Thermometer). Otherwise it might kill the Yeast. What I did was to blow on it (it was easy because 200ml was less than a cup of water) then tested the water 5 times.

3. When you reach the desired temperature you can now add in the Yeast (no need to mix/stir). Then pour the solution inside the plastic bottle. Cover it with the top (upside down).

*** When yeast ferments, it will create Carbon Dioxide that will attract mosquitoes.

Carbon dioxide will be released from the small opening of the bottle. Mosquitoes will enter and get trapped inside and hopefully drown in the sticky substance.

4. Mosquitoes love dark places, so it would be best to cover the bottle with any dark colored paper. If you don’t have black you can use two layers of news paper just like what I did. Then place the trap somewhere dark like the corners of your house.