?? Grasshopper Control

Yeah... I know. They're working on it.

It remains to be seen whether or not they'll find one that seems more than promising and conveys immunity.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't nullify my comment regarding immunity being the fundamental solution to mosquito borne disease.

If we're resistant or mostly resistant, the need to kill off the species may be less keenly felt.

interplanted how? are they crowded and shaded at all? this is the time when you want to make sure they are getting as much sun as possible. thin leaves of surrounding plants if needed.

good luck! can't imagine garlic from Wisconsin being majorly harmed by that little bit of cold.

gotta get out the rain dance gear and shake it up a bit. :)

what variety are you looking at adding?

songbird

hmm, we clean them out daily/every other day and scrub them once a week or two. not enough time for a mosquito to breed in that kind of setup.

if it moves it spreads something. just might not be anything we catch.

cats alone will keep the birds away. and if the bird baths are too close to cover of any kind they don't like that much. too easy to get ambushed...

not unless you can toss them in the air at dusk.

i've never seen a bird eat a green bean here. the closest we have to tame is the killdeer that i will go out and work around. they flutter and sqwawk for a bit, but then they settle back down and nest again. can be 2ft away. they like the gravel and perennial beds and how open it is here.

that is open enough to be bluebird hunting ground and not too far from your place for a steady water supply to be found by them.

stills sounds like you do ok with what you got going there.

songbird

? what's that?

most interesting critter i found in the ground was a bright green large grub that hissed. talk about startled!

choker loop trap works for us here when they wander in from the farm field next to us. since they feed often i can get them the same day i set the trap, once i know the run they are using.

i used to trap moles as a kid for $ as part of the mowing and lawncare stuff i did.

very supersoft fur.

seems like they could even be harvested with some kind of rake, stick, and pan arrangement. good food for a fish farm too.

i had a fried one once in college. tasted like a roach (long past those days now ha).

songbird

No argument, it's just that I've never heard of immunization against anything but viruses.

Billy wrote: ...

dang i wish i'd not taken the microbiology book back last week. :)

i'm pretty sure there are different targets possible for immunization. after all it is a system of tagging things "NOT ME" to be removed. bacteria, virus, mycoplasmid, phage, prion, DNA fragments or other cellular debris...

songbird

There's been an article per year on it in Scientific American for the last several years. It's near the top of diseases that kill or disable worldwide so the Gates Foundation had been pouring a lot of money into the effort. They have R&D projects going for the top 5 diseases at least. Immunization is the second most effective advance in medical history with only plumbing ahead of it. Developing vaccines is no longer profitable enough for the commercial companies to do so the Gates Foundation is going to save a vast number of lives in the future.

It's hard because malaria has a very complex life cycle. I would have thought that would make it easy because there are more steps that can be interrupted.

In this case that means either the humans bitten by the mosquitos are immune or that the mosquitos are immune. There have been releases of mosquitos immune to Hanta virus to test that second optoin.

There are vaccines against bacterial diseases as well. Less common but they are available. And isn't cholera a protist? When I was in the military I was given a vaccine against that just before one of my brief deployments overseas.

Thanks, Doug. Cholera is bacterium Vibrio cholerae.