Pond close to your house

4wanderingeyes

5 year old buck +
For those of you that have ponds near your house, say within 100 feet. Do they draw mosquitos closer? I have an area off my back deck that is already a low land, holds water half the year, mushy the rest or the time, or frozen. I was thinking digging a 50’x50’ area, about 3-6 feet max. Just enough to hold water. It would be a perfect area for viewing wildlife off the back deck, but being so close, is my concern.

The concern from my wife is, it will draw mosquitoes and snakes.
 
Anywhere there is stagnant water you will have mosquitos. On my pond I have garter snakes. Pretty harmless and they want to avoid you. I am actually planning on building a snake hibernaculum near our pond, they are very beneficial.
 
not my home, but one hunting camp I spend time at has a pond about a 100 ft away, its about 1/3 acre in size, and about 25 ft deep in center, NO running water in or out, but is spring fed
it 100% causes mosquito's to breed and strive, there water born insects, so where there is standing water they will hatch
things we have done to try and curb them, is spray about the area between it and all around where we hang out
we recently added a fountain to the pond to keep ripples in the water, which they claim will help, too soon to say either way, but is nice to look at , so a win there for sure! on that
we have also dyed the pond which some said would help prevent things from hatching, but didnlt see much real effect o that working, but some yrs are just worse yrs for mosquito's, so could have been just that
we do buy the floating donuts they seem to help some too

its not un live able, and I don;t really think if the pond was 1,000 ft away it would make any difference
it just water is where they live and bred and they will fly from there to where humans are ! were basically magnets for them things!

One thing I will add , is, building Bat houses can be a big help, if you still are lucky enough to have bats in your area,
we had tons at this camp and others, but the last 15 yrs or so, they are about vanished from this camp, which is why we also feel things are as bad as they are now as to yrs back!
there is a disease called White-nose syndrome (WNS) that is killing bats and has reduced there numbers to some scary low levels in some places.
but if you build bat houses and still have some, they will eat a LOT of skeeters in a night and are great additions to other steps to get rid of them!
 
I was afraid of that answer. It does hold water now, most of the years, and I am sure is a breeding ground now for mosquitos, but to make it bigger and deeper will probably only make it worse. It was a good thought though, it would have been nice to sit on the back deck and over look a pond, but I am sure what my idea of a pond in my head, and what it will turn into after a couple years are completely different things.

MRBB, we do have a few bats still hanging out here. They disappeared for a few years, but now we have some back. I have been talking about installing some bat houses for years, but we didnt see bats, now we have a few here nightly, I may have to look into some bat houses to install.

As for mosquitos, I have been spraying once a month from May until September, and it really helps a lot. I just wish the spray would work on deer flies as well. They have been relentless the past couple years.
 
In south Louisiana where I live, you almost can't go 100 feet in any direction without running into some sort of standing water. I've got a pond 60 ft from my back patio. We still sit outside and really enjoy the pond and the wildlife a pond brings. A thermacell helps a lot. They make some that are meant for use on table tops like a lantern. Keeping the weeds and grass cut helps with both snakes and mosquitos.
 
We have a 12 acre lake on our property about a 1/2 mile from the house. I don't think it has any more/less mosquitos back there versus in the woods for example.
 
Create an account on PondBoss and ask the same question.

In my opinion making existing water deeper and larger won't make it worse than it already is. Plus you might be able to stock it with fish that actively eat mosquitoe larvae and do more good than harm (as far as bug issues go). Google "fish mosquitoe eat larvae" and you should come up with something that can do well in your area. A pond that can support these fish might be better than one too shallow for fish.
 
Ponds are just awesome to have, to look at/to swim and to fish.
As far as mosquitoes if you already have any shallow standing water at all for more than a couple days it isn’t going to make it any worse.

If you dig a pond and keep edges clean…steeper sides so it gets deeper fast and put stone around it to keep water clearer and discourage edge weed growth I think it would be a non issue.
Especially with plenty of minnows and shiners in it.
We have noticed zero increase in mosquitoes around our new pond and we are out there almost every day late evenings and early mornings to water new fruit trees and feed the fish.

We have a woods thirty yards from it and that is the only area I ever have mosquitoes bother me is right along the edge of woods if I get close to it.

We have dozens of tree swallows/ barn swallows and purple martens constantly patrolling the air above the pond keeping us almost bug free.

Keep shore line weeds/brush away and mow right up to edge and the pond will not be “buggy” at all.
 
I personally think the larger deeper the less
mosquitoes issues you will have versus very shallow standing water the larger body of water will promote many more mosquito larva predators than a very shallow swamp area.
 
Make it big enough to keep fish in. When we bought our house it came with a 2 year old, 10 ft deep pond roughly 25 by 70 yards about 80 yards from the house. Mosquitos were bad. We put fish in, now mosquitos are not any worse than neighbors without a pond.
 
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