Why do I have mosquitoes at my house when there isn’t any standing water?

Ever summer we have a mosiquitoe problem at my house and I am sick of getting eaten alive! There is no standing water around my house, other than some neighbors have pools. But this hasn’t been a problem until recently.

If I understand you correctly you have had mosquito problems in the summer even before your neighbors had pools, so it is not likely that the pools are a problem. Highly chlorinated water is not a good breeding place for mosquitos anyway. As a biologist, my guess would be that you have three different things going on. First, the fact that you have animals is a negative because the animals have a higher basal temperature than you do and are more attractive to mosquitos. It is true that mosquitos home in on carbon dioxide, but they are also very heat sensitive and even the Carbon dioxide from your pets is at a higher temperature than human carbon dioxide. Second, I suspect that you live within a mile or so of an area that does retain water even during the heat of the Arizona summer. It could be a well-watered golf course, a botanical garden, a spring, or a plant nursery. Lots of other places would qualify too. There only has to be a film of water for mosquitos to breed. The larvae which are suspended in water while they develop need only about one eighth of an inch of water to be be perfectly healthy. There are raised in labs that study mosquitos in a very small amount of water. Even a well irrigated lawn or dense shrubbery, particularly evergreens, will serve as a reservoir for adult mosquitos. They like to sit in areas of high humidity until they are ready to start their feeding flights. Remember, we are talking about micro-climates when we talk about where adult mosquitos and their larvae are found. Literally Thousands of mosquitos could be harbored in the ground cover that might be used to outline a driveway or walkway. It just needs to be moist and shady. A mosquito is very small and a place that you might consider sunny will offer plenty of shady patches for hundreds of mosquitos. Finally, some people are just more attractive to mosquitos than others. We really aren’t sure exactly why, but two people sitting side-by-side wearing no fragrances and using no repellent can have completely different experiences with mosquitos. There isn’t anything you can do about your natural fragrance, but you may find that if you change the artificial fragrances you wear, deodorant, after shave, cologne, perfume, soaps, shampoos, etc. that you will be far less attractive to mosquitos. Wearing repellant all the time is not fun, and probably isn’t that healthy either.

For more than a dozen years I lived on a salt marsh in the deep south and really struggled with those huge, hungry mosquitos. The solution for me was to fog the yard each night with a mixture of insecticide and repellant. It also helps if you have a lawn to treat the lawn with a pelletized insecticide. This can greatly reduce the amount of safe cover available to mosquitos. Avon makes a product called skin so soft that some people swear by as an insect repellent of low toxicity. Mosquitos and sand gnats just don’t seem to like the way it smells. It can be diluted greatly with water and still works pretty well. Finally, the propane or kerosene powered insect repellers work pretty well if you are not in a place that has too much wind.

I may be that none of this will work for you. I hope it will though. The place to continue working on the problem if none of this helps is with your county extension service. There are ranchers and others for whom mosquitos are a continuing problem and the county extension service usually knows what is going on with treatment in your area.

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I read that most of the mosquitoes on your property were likely born there although strong winds can blow them in. The female must have the protean from a blood meal to lay an egg (but can eat its own wings to do so). People who eat garlic on a regular basis rarely are bitten (they don’t taste good even to tiny vampires?). Garlic oil emulsion is used as a mosquito killer. I found a product (Mosquito Dunks) that kill mosquito larvae (in bird baths, etc.) for about 30 days. Perhaps you need some treated waster to attract them and do them in. if you have been losing the battle, you may have to start from scratch, right?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Home And Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.