Noah Missed the Boat!

Most everyone knows the biblical story of Noah, how he built a huge boat and took two of every kind of animal aboard it to replenish the earth after God destroyed everyone and everything in a huge flood…THE flood.

According to the bible, Noah was a good and righteous man and God chose him to take charge of building the ark to certain specifications, then to gather the animals two-by-two, then get his family and all the animals he had assembled and go aboard the ark, close it up, and be ready for a lot of rain.

What most people don’t know is that, well, Noah missed the boat!

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As most of you know, I grew up in, and currently live in, the Missouri Bootheel.  Although some residents mistakenly call the area the Missouri Boot Hill, or even the Missouri Boot Hell, it is also known to most residents, more or less jokingly, as Swampeast, Missouri.

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Until after the end of the 19th century, much of the area now known as the Bootheel was covered by swamp.  Just after the beginning of the 21st century, a group of businessmen formed The Little Dixie Drainage District and went to work draining the swamp and logging it off to convert the area to some of the richest farmland in the entire country.

They got rid of the swamps.  They got rid of the trees.  But they didn’t get rid of the mosquitoes. 

I find it hard to believe that there could have possibly been more of the little blood-suckers than there are now.

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When I was a kid, my friends and I used to ride our bicycles through the “fog” emitted by trucks driving all the roads in town.  More than one account I’ve read says that mist was DDT.  I do know that area residents were blissfully ignorant of it, and were glad to get a little relief from the hordes of mosquitoes that were still around more than half-a-century after the swamps were drained.

Before area towns unleashed mosquito fogging trucks, people used other methods to try to avoid pesky bites.  My mother told me how, in her childhood, her father burning “coal oil” (kerosene) rags.  The acrid smoke kept the voracious bugs at bay, not to mention what it must have done to the lungs of the people who had to breathe it so they could stay close enough to enjoy that modicum of relief.

Living in the country, mosquito sprayers don’t come around and the dangers of breathing coal oil smoke is better understood.  When we have to be outside at night, we either wear way more clothing than is comfortable during the hot, humid Bootheel summers, or spray ourselves down with insect repellants, the most effective of which contain DEET.

According to the Health Research Fund (https://healthresearchfunding.org/dangers-deet/), DEET (N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide) has been associated with seizures, rashes, slurred speech, confusion, muscle twitching, and, oh yeah…death. 

At least one organization, the World Bank, that concerns itself with poverty in third-world countries, estimates that breathing kerosene smoke is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day…and that estimate is from using kerosene lamps, which I’ll bet puts off less concentrated fumes than burning rags soaked in the stuff. 

As I’ve already said, the clouds of “fog” we kids played in supposedly contained high concentrations of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), which was outlawed in 1972 because of its association with “the death of fish, birds, and other forms of wild life”.  Do you think it might have been bad for humans too?

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So, is there a safe alternative to these dangerous substances for control of mosquitoes?

There are a few companies that sell variations of machines that emit chemical attractants, then vacuum the bugs into a container when they fly close.  I can’t speak to their effectiveness but the ones I did read about used heat and CO2 (carbon dioxide) as the attractant, and thus should be safe.  However, anything that has to be plugged in or has batteries that must be changed periodically, plus has prepackaged chemicals that must be ordered and replenished from time to time, raises certain concerns.  I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on something that will, sooner or later, break, and that the manufacturers can stop making it, or replacement parts/chemical packs, at any moment, thus necessitating the purchase of something new to do the same thing.

I was introduced to the citronella plant by friends in Canada.  Annie and I tried it but found it unsatisfactory.  I’ll admit we might have had better results with a larger, or more, plants. 

Annie and I have tried numerous different “natural” insect repellants on ourselves and our family.  We didn’t find them to work well enough either.

The search for effective, safe alternatives to dangerous chemicals continued until just two years ago.  That’s when I stumbled across the Spartan Mosquito Eradicator.

I bought some Mosquito Eradicators about halfway through that mosquito season, and the nasty critters were already out in full force.  After just a few days, I could tell a difference in the number of bites I got when I stayed outside after the sun set…prime mosquito time.

Last year Annie refilled and rehung them at the very beginning of mosquito season.  A couple weeks later I had to go out to my studio to reset our internet.  It was after dark and I had already showered, so I was in my robe.  Even with the Eradicator, I was expecting a few bites.

I did not get one, single mosquito bite.  Not ONE!  Really!

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Available from Amazon.com and many other places, the Spartan Mosquito Eradicator is, basically, a plastic container with a hook on top.  All you do is add water and hang the containers.  You need to use enough Eradicators so that you can hang them around your yard, generally in the corners, no more than 150 feet apart.  You don’t hang them close to the places where you want to be, as they first attract mosquitoes, then kill them.  Thus, if you place them too close to your picnic table, for instance, the blood-suckers that have been attracted to the Eradicator, but haven’t died yet, may still look to you as their last meal.

Also important to us, whereas poisonous sprays and bug zappers kill a lot of beneficial and harmless bugs.  The poison in the Eradicator kills VERY few bugs other than mosquitoes.  I like that.

At about $25 for a pair (Two is enough for an average size city yard), the Eradicator is affordable.  For a normal length mosquito season, they will have to be recharged/refilled or replaced about once during the season.  Read the instructions.

I found an alternative to spending more than a few cents to get all the good results.  The ingredients list was basically sodium chloride, sucrose, and yeast.  Yep, that’s salt, sugar, and yeast.  Sounds like a recipe for bread, minus the flour, doesn’t it?  I started trying to figure out the proper recipe to make our own refill for the tubes.

Annie beat me to it.  On Pinterest.com she found this:

You will need:

A 2-liter plastic bottle

A sharp serrated knife

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup warm water

1 teaspoon active dry yeast

Start by carefully cutting off the top third of the bottle and then pour in all the ingredients into the bottom part. Then you just need to flip the cut off part upside-down and place that back onto the bottle. This little concoction attracts the flying bloodsuckers so they’ll fly in there and get trapped – they aren’t too good at flying upwards and out again so they’ll stay in there and out of your hair.

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So that method actually traps the mosquitoes.  I haven’t tried using the 2-liter bottles and don’t think they are really necessary, and they might start to stink, thus compromising the effectiveness of the attractant.  More than that, not using them really doesn’t seem to hurt the efficiency of the formula.

I’m not necessarily recommending you do this instead of buying the Mosquito Eradicator.  If the modest price and the process of reordering means less to you than to us, go right ahead and buy the Eradicator.  I definitely recommend the Spartan Mosquito Eradicator.  I do.  But, if life keeps you as busy as it does us, and you know you’ll forget to reorder until mosquitoes have sent in thousands and thousands of reinforcements, try the recipe above.  It’s quick, easy, and seems as effective as the original.

We mix up the Pinterest recipe and poor it into the tubes we got with the Mosquito Eradicator.

So, whether you go with the Mosquito Eradicator or just use the Pinterest formula, it’s up to you.  Either way, give it a try, unless, of course, you LIKE being a smorgasbord for thousands of six-legged vampires.

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But what about the name of this post, and the sentence at the end of the introductory paragraphs?  How did Noah miss the boat?

That should be obvious by now; he had the perfect opportunity to smash those two mosquitoes and save us all lots of swatting and itching.

I’m just saying.

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Note: Of course, Noah actually made it aboard the ark.  Also, he didn’t take two of every animal; he took seven of some.  Come ON, y’all, read your bible! 

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