Mosquitoes

[Sue]

Mosquitoes are feeding on my hens in the Green Frog during the night! Any ideas on how to stop them? The pop hole is being left open at night as it's so hot, but even if I closed this, the vents are still open and they could get through any gaps anyway. Should I be bothered by this or not worry?

 

[Marigold]

Where are they breeding, Sue? Have you got a pond (the fish feed on any larvae our pond may collect so Mozzies not a problem here.) or is there an uncovered water butt that hasn't been emptied lately? Or even a bucket of stagnant water somewhere?
If you could find where they're breeding maybe you could stop them at their source.

 

[Sue]

There's a wildlife pond about 6 feet away from their run!! There's frogs in it, but as it's a wildlife pond there's no fish. We put this pond in this spring and I didn't even consider that this would cause a problem with mosquitos and the hens (stupidly!)

 

[Marigold]

A few goldfish would sort out the problem. We have had goldfish in our pond since we put it in, 35 years ago, we never feed them, they are just part of the system within the pond. They do breed but don't get very big, and the visiting heron is welcome to a few if he can catch them. After a few years they revert to being their natural brown colour in any case. I suppose people who breed them for sale weed out the brown ones. We also have thriving colonies of frogs, newts, dragonflies (3 kinds) damselflies etc and the goldfish don't interfere with any of the other many species. The edges of the pond are just wild plants and recently we gained marsh orchids from somewhere, I really don't know how they got there.

 

[Sue]

The pond would not be big enough to have fish without them eating all the wildlife that we are trying to attract. I'll have to spray some citronella around the house or something to try and fend them off!