The Easy Solution For Keeping Mosquitoes Away From Your Bird Bath

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A beautiful yard is perfect for enjoying relaxing summer evenings, and it's even more delightful when birds are visitors to our outdoor spaces. To keep our feathered friends happy and healthy, they need food, shelter, and of course, a bird bath for drinking and bathing themselves. Unfortunately, however, this experience can easily be ruined by mosquitos treating you like a pincushion. You may have tried herbs like citronella to help deter these pests to varying degrees of success, but the still water in a bird bath acts like a magnet. Thank goodness there's an even easier solution for preventing those biting insects from multiplying in your bird bath: mosquito dunks.

If you're trying to attract more birds to your bird bath, you don't want to be bothered by disease-spreading insects when you're outside. Mosquitos lay their eggs in still water, which can make it problematic to keep a bird bath without creating a breeding ground. You may have heard about making a dunk bucket — the solution for ridding your yard of mosquitos without damaging good pollinators. With this hack, you'll follow the same process, except you'll be placing mosquito dunks into a bird bath instead of a bucket.

Mosquito dunks look like small donuts, and rather than deterring the pests like most other solutions, they keep their population from growing. These dunks contain Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti), a larvicide which kills mosquito larvae and prevents them from developing into adults. Unlike other types of sprays which kill all sorts of insects in your yard indiscriminately, including bees, butterflies, and other pollinators, dunks are able to kill the target pests without harming other insects that are considered beneficial. When you have standing water in a bird bath and know that these pests are going to be an issue, you simply place one of these products, such as Summit Responsible Solutions Mosquito Dunks, in the water where it will dissolve.

The mosquito dunk will remain effective for one month — after that, you'll need to replace it. When using this solution to keep your bird bath from becoming a breeding ground for pests, keep in mind that you should add the dunk before you notice larvae in the water. Once you have established a monthly routine to keep mosquitoes from breeding in your bird bath, you might want to use some of our smart tips for keeping your bird bath beautiful, like soaking it with vinegar and water to help keep it clean.