Tick Tubes

In our constant quest to rid our yard of unpleasant biting things, we have used a service to spray our yard (despite my misgivings about it affecting other bugs we want to keep around, like bees and butterflies). For the last two summers, we also used two GAT devices, though we sometimes forget to maintain them throughout the season. This year, we added something else to our arsenal: tick tubes.

We opted to try homemade ones, though we failed to plan ahead and save the dozens of toilet paper/paper towel tubes that would have been necessary. We worked with what we had available within the span of a weekend and decided to give it a try. It seemed silly to spend $50 or more when we had all the ingredients so readily available. When we set out new ones later in the year, we will plan better.

Cardboard tubes, dryer lint (and some additional cotton balls, because - again - we didn't plan ahead very well) and permethrin and BAM, tick killers. There are lots of online instructions to find. The basic idea is to soak the lint in a permethrin solution of about 7-8% strength (so dilution depends on how strong the solution is that you have in the bottle already). Let them dry out and then stuff them in toilet paper tubes. In theory, mice will use the lint for building nests and the permethrin, which is harmless for mammals, will infect the ticks that also settle there.

Again, because we waited until it was "go time" to do this, we didn't realize that it required far more tubes than we expected (they're supposed to be every 10-15 ft, around the edge of the property). But we tried with what we could. Timing seemed more important here than getting it perfect, because th aim is to do it right around tick breeding season in late April. In fact, we may have been a week too late even then, because we found a tick a couple of weeks earlier. But again, it's our first time - we'll do better next round (which I guess is in July some time).

Our tick tubes are gently buried in the leaves, hopefully where the mice will find them. The one in this picture is practically invisible, and pretty near our GAT, in fact. This picture kills two biting insects with one shot...And that weak play on words probably makes you want to groan.

Fingers crossed that these efforts actually help. It would be so nice to go in the yard and not feel like I'm a feast to all sorts of disease-carrying critters.