How To Protect Your Property With DIY Tick Tubes

It is very difficult to overstate the impact that tick-borne diseases have had on North America’s outdoors scene over the past couple of decades. We’ve gone from “What the heck is Lyme’s Disease” to carefully—very carefully—dressing to keep these parasitic arachnids at bay when we’re outdoors, and treating ourselves with insect repellent to boot. It might seem like a lot of fuss, but if you’re around home base, you can relax a bit and protect your property with DIY tick tubes.

Jump right to How To

How DIY Tick Tubes Work

DIY tick tubes work by using mice to propagate insecticide that kills ticks. Clever stuff—here’s how you make them.

First, buy some permethrin. Be careful; this is a nasty chemical, and it doesn’t just kill ticks. It’s lethal to other insects as well, and it’s harmful to cats and fish. But if you want to kill ticks, it does the job.

Materials You’ll Need

You probably have everything else needed for this DIY tick tubes project lying around your house:

• spray bottle
• cardboard box or metal pan
• cotton balls or dryer lint
• PVC tubing or toilet paper rolls

Start by donning rubber gloves and, if necessary, safety glasses as well. You don’t want to get permethrin on your skin if you can avoid it, even if it is a commonly prescribed medication.

Pour the permethrin into the spray bottle, and use it to apply the insecticide to the cotton balls or dryer lint, using the pan or cardboard box as a backstop.

Alternatively, you can just pour the permethrin into a leak-proof container and dip the cotton balls or dryer lint directly into the insecticide. This isn’t rocket science; you’re just trying to soak up the permethrin, so it kills ticks on contact.

Let the cotton balls or lint dry after you’ve applied the permethrin. Some people prefer to apply a second dose of permethrin, which provides an extra layer of bug-killing protection.

Once the cotton balls or lint are dry, place them into the toilet paper rolls or PVC tubing. This will act as a container, protecting the soaked material from the elements in your yard. Obviously, PVC tubing will work better than cardboard toilet paper rolls if/when it rains. You’ll be leaving these out for weeks at a time, so think about how long you want the insecticide to last in the tube. Of course, you can also replace them over the summer.

Place the tubes around your property in areas where you can intercept field mice. The idea is that the mice will encounter your fuzzy, permethrin-soaked material in the tubes and haul it back to line their nests. Since field mice are a common host for ticks, the blood-sucking bugs will be exposed to permethrin when rodents are present in their living space, and the insecticide will kill them off.

Safety and Placement Tips

This is obviously not going to kill every tick around your property, but it is one tactic to reduce their numbers, and every little bit can help in this war on their population. However, you should be careful when you deploy DIY tick tubes, because they may impact other wildlife you don’t want to hurt. Permethrin is highly toxic to fish, frogs, salamanders, and other aquatic wildlife. Avoid using tick tubes in areas where they may impact freshwater or saltwater environments. Also, think through the potential of what might happen if mice are exposed to permethrin and your cat, or someone else’s cat, gets hold of one of those rodents. You don’t want to make your feline friend sick.

And one last consideration: permethrin is also toxic towards honeybees, and our favorite pollinators are already having enough trouble with other lethal threats. Plan your DIY tick tube trapline accordingly, and steer clear of any bees’ nests on your property.

Zac K.

Zac Kurylyk hunts and fishes to feed his family in the northeast. His work has been in Outdoor Canada and other adventure and outdoors publications.