In the late 1990s, my grandfather bought a mail-order bat box as a natural approach to mosquito management. The dark green plywood roost was mounted on tall wooden poles on a sunny patch in the yard and stabilized with tension wires. The catalog promised that the bats would raise their pups inside the box and feast on the mosquitoes that swarmed my grandparents' lakefront yard.
The bat box always seemed like an undisputed win for all parties (save the mosquitoes). But when I started researching a bat box for our mosquito-plagued property in North Carolina, I learned that some off-the-shelf boxes, like the kind my grandfather used, are essentially bat ovens. In hot months, artificial roosts that are poorly located, too small, darkly painted, or insufficiently ventilated can reach lethal temperatures, killing bat pups.
