It’s not summer without mosquitoes, unfortunately, but a little protection and prevention can make the great outdoors a lot greater. A NoVA expert has tips on staying free from itchy bites.
Protect Yourself
When you’re outside, the best way to protect yourself is to simply cover up. “Wear long sleeves and cover your skin as much as possible,” says Kirsten Anne Conrad, an agriculture natural resource extension agent at Virginia Tech’s Virginia Cooperative Extension.
Fans also help, she says; mosquitoes don’t like windy conditions.
Any insect repellent with DEET in it will do a good job of protecting you, Conrad says; you don’t need more than a 30 percent concentration.
Other effective repellents include lemon eucalyptus oil, Picaridin, and Merck 3535 (also known as IR3535), she adds. (Citronella oil works if you actually rub it into your skin; candles, she says, don’t work.)
Protect Your Property
NoVA generally sees two kinds of mosquitoes, Conrad says: the small brown mosquito, which flies in the evenings, and the larger Asian tiger mosquito, which does its biting in the daytime.
The brown mosquito breeds in natural water holes, Conrad says — “things like tree holes” and puddles in the woods. They don’t breed around natural bodies of water such as lakes or ponds, since their predators know to hang out there.
“But any unnatural or temporary body of water that’s typically found in a dump, or a puddle in the woods or something like that” is a good breeding ground, she says.
Asian tiger mosquitoes are “the biggest nuisance to people, because people are mostly active and outdoors in the daytime.” They do their breeding around the kind of human-made bodies of water that can be found on some residential properties.
The way to keep your property from becoming a mosquito hangout is to get at the eggs.
Mosquitoes lay eggs next to water, typically on grasses. The eggs hatch, and the young mosquitoes “live out part of their life cycle in water before they turn into adults,” Conrad says.
That’s the easiest and most ecologically friendly time to get rid of them, she adds.
The process of turning from a larva into an adult only takes about 10 days, so it’s important to keep on top of things on a regular basis.
These mosquitoes can breed in as small a body of water as the inside of a bottle cap, so vigilance pays off: kiddie pools, dog dishes, flowerpot trays, lawn furniture — all of these things can retain enough rainwater to make for a good mosquito breeding ground.
While some pest control services will spray your property to repel mosquitoes, and they advertise using cedar oil, which is natural and harmless, Conrad says the problem is “none of [the substances] are selective.”
“It will negatively affect any other insect that it comes in contact with,” Conrad says. “That sounds delightful to some people, but it is not. We need insects for pollination; we need them for food for birds.”
You can find out more on the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia website.
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