If we followed all the suggestions about protecting ourselves from ticks and mosquitoes – don’t go out during times of maximum activity, use repellants, wear long sleeve shirts, tape your pants – we probably wouldn’t get bitten but we also wouldn’t get much work done or would die from heat stroke! Therefore, perhaps our best line of defense is to provide the least hospitable environment we can for the development of mosquito populations.
Make sure you don’t have standing pools of water in things like old tires, rubbish areas, old five gallon buckets etc. Drain them, drill them or turn them over. But you are very apt to have containers like rain barrels, water troughs for animals or small ponds that can’t be treated so easily. Here, your best solution is to use a product like Summit’s MOSQUITO DUNKS. These are small compressed circles containing bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti) – a bacterium that is commonly found in damp leaf mold. Throw a DUNK into the barrel. The bacterium is released into the water as the circle slowly dissolves. Mosquitoes lay their eggs on the surface of standing water. The eggs hatch and the larvae develop in the water. Ever look into some standing water at this time of the year and see those little wormy looking things wriggling around? The bacteria enter the mosquito larvae, damage their guts and eventually kill them. And yes, Bti is non-toxic to mammals, birds, fish and virtually all insects.
So put your mosquito repellant on and go clean up your hidden mosquito breeding puddles. Buy some DUNKS and treat those large water collection containers you use. And do your part to protect yourself, your family and your neighbors from mosquito borne diseases like West Nile virus and EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis).
Oh yes, don’t forget to put your bat houses up.