One of our favorite tricks we have learned since buying our land has been using tick tubes to reduce the number of ticks we get while traipsing around on our acreage. The first year we owned this land, I ended up pulling over 200 ticks per person. The following year, after treating twice with tick tubes, we only saw about 20 ticks in total. Last year, we repeated the tubes and saw another year of very few ticks. I just finished deploying the first round of our 2024 tubes so I wanted to share what we do and how we do it in case you want to give it a try yourself.
We put them out in early-mid March and do a second deployment in early-mid June. This is timed to coincide with the nesting season of rodents, particularly the white-footed mouse, which is a primary vector of ticks. By disrupting tick's ability to use the rodents in their life cycle, you can eradicate up to 90% of the tick population.
Noteworthy: we missed the June 2021 application and saw a rapid rebound in the tick population. We have lots of deer who hang out on our 20 acres so I know they are a factor, but my strong recommendation is to make sure you do both the March and June applications of tick tubes. It also seems that some tubes is a lot better than no tubes. So if you only have time to make 20 per acre, that is still going to have a worthwhile effect.
Supplies:
Cotton balls
Tubes (from toilet paper, paper towel, or wrapping paper)
Pesticide spray - permethrin or pyrethrin
Sprayer
Protective Gloves
Mask (optional)
How Many Do I Need?
To figure out how many of these tubes you need to treat your land, we use the rule of 50 per acre. For 20 acres, that means we use 1000 tubes. That seems like a lot but since we only do it two times a year and it's worth it, we just buckle down and get it done. We save our paperboard tubes all year and we have lots of friends and family save theirs for us too. We collect our tubes ahead of time so we know we will have enough and we store them in our garage in plastic 50-gallon drums or trash bags until we need to use them. After counting tubes the first year as we put them in trash bags to carry them when we disperse them, we had an idea of how many bags we need to fill to have the tubes we need, so that makes it easy to gauge how many tubes we have at a given time and gives us a target to fill a certain number of bags when we assemble the tubes instead of needing to count them. A large kitchen trash bag seems to hold about 200 tubes when stuffed to the brim.
As far as how many cotton balls you will need, I have found using about 7 per tube works well. I hold three cotton balls together and insert them into one end of the rube like a cork, then place a single one in the middle of the tube, followed by three more to cork the opposite end. So, 7 per tube for 1000 tubes means we need around 7,000 cotton balls, I have found the best ones to be Equate Jumbo size cotton balls, and ordering online is easy. You can also run by your local Wal-Mart and pick them up, particularly if you only need a few bags of them.
I changed up our approach last year and found that pre-stuffing the tubes with the cotton balls works best. Anyone can help (kids included), and they can be done well in advance.
We use an organic pyrethrin so that it breaks down rapidly and doesn't risk residual damage to other insects. We are trying to specifically target ticks, not other bugs and especially not our beloved pollinators. If you don't want to go to that extra length, a non organic option will work too.
We use a half-gallon sprayer, like this one.
Put on your gloves and get your pesticide solution mixed. Use the instructions on the bottle and mix 1/2 ounce with a half gallon of water. **Keep these pesticides away from your animals. Cats, in particular, are sensitive to pyrethrins, so you will want to keep your cats away while you are spraying and stuffing the cotton balls. Our cats get temporarily locked up until we are done making them. I have also found that I am particularly sensitive as well. I wear a tyvek painting suit and a mask and doing the spraying/assembling outdoors is better than in our garage.
Squirt a little pyrethrin into both ends of each tube, then I usually place them in a garbage bag for easy containment and because the bag is easy to lug around the land when it is time to distribute the tubes (I usually reuse the bags from one year to the next to save on waste). You can let the tubes dry in some cardboard boxes first if you prefer, but I've found that getting them put straight out is best. I use gloves when distributing the tubes since they're still wet when I do that.
I toss the tubes around, focusing on areas where you think mice will travel and hide like brush piles and near tree trunks. The way these tubes work is for mice to use the cotton balls to make their nests. These nests are a primary egg-laying spot for ticks, so by treating the mouse nests, you will effectively kill all the ticks that end up there as well as any end up on the mice themselves. To visualize how many you need to throw out in a given section, first mark off one acre (an open area is easiest), then put your 50 tubes out, positioning them evenly throughout that acre. Once you know your tube spacing, just try to mimic that through the rest of the land you are treating. Thick areas can be trickier to visualize but I found that starting in an open space sets us up to get them evenly distributed. You'll know you hit your mark when you either hit your halfway mark having used half the tubes, or when you finish and used up all the tubes you made.