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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

There was a recent story of a pest control company that accidentally sprayed the wrong yard while the person was away running errands. They even left an invoice.

She'd spent 3 years cultivating a pollinator friendly yard. The next day she noticed there were no butterflies around.

https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/pest-company-mistakenly...

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Why the hell would you ever want your yard sprayed?

Mosquitos are dangerous, painful and a huge nuisance for a lot of people.

If we're talking about the USA, mosquitos are not dangerous enough to warrant taking any action whatsoever. Of the dozens and dozens of species of mosquito, there are less than a handful that are potentially dangerous, and only in a small region, and only sometimes.

There is no reason to spray chemical toxins in a yard because of mosquitos.

If you want to take action to reduce mosquito numbers, start with pooling water. They are often able to breed in ruts left by vehicles driving on paths where they aren't supposed to be.

Zika [1], West Nile, Encephalitis, Dengue, Chikungunya have all shown up in at least Texas and Florida in the past few years [2]. While I agree reducing pooled water is the most important vector control action you can take, it seems likely that the US will not remain immune from arboviruses in the long term. Thankfully the vast majority of cases continue to be travel-related but there are small numbers of locally-acquired disease being reported since ~2013.

Which is to say in those areas at least you should most definitely wear long clothes, wear an approved repellent, and avoid sleeping in unprotected areas (rooms with open windows without screens, outdoors without netting, etc).

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/zika/geo/index.html [2, and annual summaries]: https://www.dshs.texas.gov/idcu/disease/arboviral/westNile/r...

Mosquitoes are pretty generally determined to be bad. Their value to any ecosystem is difficult to justify. However, many methods used to eliminate them have collateral damage.

I want this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

If you search for videos, particularly the high speed captures, you'll be impressed.

Holy crap! I imagined this exact thing when I was a kid. I didn't think it had ever become a reality. Very cool.

We put up a few bat houses in our yard this spring. We think a few have finally moved in to one. These are really supposed to help control mosquitoes.

we have a bat house at the farm and not only do they do an excellent job patrolling..the area where they drop their poop is the best fertilised soil.

That's not a good reason to do the equivalent of carpet bombing and killing every other sort of insect life.

I encourage people to put up bat houses, one of the mosquito's natural predators.

If someone doesn't take good care of their yard and/or there is an infestation of sorts (E.g. ticks in relation to lyme disease, beetles destroying native plants,etc) some governments may even require you to spray the yard.

At my last place, in the mountains, if you did not spray outside the house, you would have ants and spiders up the wazoo in the house.

Those can be handled in other ways. For instance, seal openings to the outdoors, keep the house clean so ants aren't getting food, lay out ant poison that they take back to their nests so it's more targeted, spray diluted citrus oils in the places spiders like to hang out since they don't like the smell, etc.

or encourage possums to go tick picking.

> you would have ants and spiders up the wazoo in the house.

The spiders are great, they control the flies and other pests. The ants are a minor annoyance.

Some people have anaphylaxis to bee stings. There are other ways to deal with that, sure, but I have a hard time blaming someone for trying to get rid of an immediately deadly hazard.

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