<\/p>\n

The mosquitos are terrible in Oklahoma this summer. Our backyard has been absolutely overrun by the little bloodsuckers. A couple of weeks ago I attemped to repair a section of our fence that the wind knocked down. Before I could even reach the fence, I had seven mosquitos biting my left leg and five on the right. We sprayed the entire yard and hung repellent, and it seems to have worked. Our swimming pool became the final resting place for hundreds of the little buggers, and we spent several days in a row scooping them out with a net.<\/p>\n

The mosquitos have been replaced by flies. It’s not unusual in the summer to see a fly or two hovering around our outdoor trash bins, but last weekend I saw fifty or more, and based on what I found inside the bin it appears they were doing more than eating garbage. When I brought our trash bins back up from the street today I discovered they were full of maggots. <\/p>\n

I’ll be honest — most of my maggot knowledge came from The Lost Boys<\/a> and Poltergeist<\/a>, so you can probably understand why I wasn’t excited about dealing with them. Multiple Google results advised me to pour pots of boiling water into the bins. Most of those same pages suggested secondary actions, like pouring bleach into the bins or spraying the insides with a mixture of water and vinegar, but they all agreed on the boiling water, so that’s what I did first. If nothing else, it was a cheap solution. Fortunately, maggots don’t make a noise when you pour scalding water over them, and the process of making maggot stew wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. Once the deed was done I sprayed the bins clean using our garden hose and let them dry. For now, they’re clean and maggot free.<\/p>\n

Every night we scoop June bugs (usually dead) and frogs (usually alive) out of the pool. We’ve got owls and hawks hanging out nightly in the trees behind our house. We sprayed for mosquitos and flies, and today I killed hundreds of maggots. I almost ended this post by saying “what else you got?” before remembering that I’ve only seen one snake so far this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The mosquitos are terrible in Oklahoma this summer. Our backyard has been absolutely overrun by the little bloodsuckers. A couple of weeks ago I attemped to repair a section of our fence that the wind knocked down. Before I could even reach the fence, I had seven mosquitos biting my left leg and five on the right. We sprayed the entire yard and hung repellent, and it seems to have worked. Our swimming pool became the final resting place for hundreds of the little buggers, and we spent several days in a row scooping them out with a net. The… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13223"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13227,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13223\/revisions\/13227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}