I'm thinking about putting up a bat house to help control the flying insects around my house. More specifically, I want them to gorge themselves on every dang mosquito they can possibly eat. Does anyone have any experience with bat houses? Do they really help control the insect population?
I was going to build a bathouse, but I found a couple of the cedar ones at Lowes on sale alot cheaper than I could have built one. I put two houses on one 2x10 pole, but I have not gotten any bats to take notice of them. We have alot of bats flying in the neighborhood doing their job every night so they are staying somewhere. I saw some larger bathouses at Wild Birds Unlimited.
From what I was told, nothing eats mosquitoes like bats. You certainly want to make sure you don't have them roosting in your attic or chimney though since they are the leader in rabies infection transmitted to humans.
You may also want to plant rosemary, lavendar, or some other strong smelling herbal plant near your home. These plants will help keep mosquitoes away.
Ours have been up for over 10 years without anyone taking up residence. Only the squirrels have shown interest and they just clawed the hell out of it, since they can't get in it.
we had one up for a few years, it only became home to a wasps nest and some dirt-dobbers (sp ?). We do have bats in the area, but they never seemed to get any use out of it.
It sounds like some of you haven't had any luck actually attracting any bats. I would hate to waste my money to build a wasp nest. Did you buy your bat house or did you build it? I read that bigger houses will attract more bats. I found this website with some interesting information: http://www.batcon.org/
We bought ours at Lowes or Home Depot... it had directions with it for how high to hang it, and which direction to face it. We hung it per the directions so I don't know why we never attracted any bats.
