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It's been a good summer for mosquitoes. By which I mean, for us. We haven't had to hose down with Deep Woods Off when we step outside to check the mail.
I hear it's bad Up North, with grown men exsanguinated in minutes if they leave the cabin after dark. But here in the Cities, it's not so bad. Here are some possible reasons:
1. The mosquito control folks are doing a bang-up job. They drop specially formatted chemical pellets in ponds, if I understand the procedure, and then mosquitoes eat the pellets and choke, because they don't know the first thing about Heimlich-ing a fellow mosquito.
The pellets are better than the spraying. I remember low-flying planes spraying our neighborhood when I was growing up. I'm still surprised they didn't sterilize everyone in North Dakota in the process.
2. The bats are numerous, and doing their part. It's amazing how bats find mosquitoes in the dark. It must be exhausting to get a full dinner out of the effort. It would be like running around in a darkened Old Country Buffet and someone's flinging chickpeas from the salad bar at random for you to catch in your mouth.
3. The new anti-skeeter machine we got actually works. It's not a zapper. It's not a fogger that sits in the corner of the yard and exhales carbon dioxide, like Gramps taking a long snoring nap. No, it attracts the mosquitoes by heat and UV light, and traps them. I emptied it the other day, and it was absolutely packed with bugs. All of them moths. I told myself the moths had eaten the mosquitoes.
4. Drought. No rain = no mosquitoes. As we all know, mosquitoes can spring to life in the amount of water that fills a soda bottle cap. Now, I know what you're thinking: Why didn't you say a pop bottle cap? You're not from around these parts, are you?
Sorry. I switch between speaking Minnesotan and Notfromherean.
Oh, I suppose you say duck duck goose like an outsider, too.
Actually, I don't know. It just never comes up. The opportunity to do the goose-goose-beige-ostrich thing tends to diminish as one ages.
Anyway. The point is that skeeters can arise, practically from spontaneous generation, in small amounts of standing water. How, I've no idea. Leave a glass on the counter in your house, and nothing happens. Leave it outside and six hours later you have to shave a buzzing, stabbing caul of mosquitoes off your arm with a butter knife.
So if you do set out little bottle caps filled with water, because you think the hummingbirds might get thirsty, you might want to jostle them every five minutes or so. I have a water fountain in the backyard, but it's not a source of skeeter birth: It splashes, and this disrupts skeeter mating, like they're honeymooners on a water bed in an earthquake.
5. Climate change killed them all. We might be headed for global extinction, but the skeeters went first.
I'll mark that in the "win" side of the ledger.
