License to Squish

There are two mosquito problems and almost everything written about them treats it as one. That is why nothing you bought has worked.

Something bites you at dusk. It came from a ditch, a storm drain, or a neglected pool three houses down, and it flew a long way to reach you. You are not solving that one from your own yard, and anybody who says otherwise is selling a subscription.

Something else bites your ankles at two in the afternoon while you are weeding. That one is different. It breeds in containers, a bottle cap holds enough water, and it barely travels. The daytime mosquitoes in your yard came out of something you own.

Nobody sent them. They hatched in the saucer under your fern, in the fold of the tarp, in the corrugated downspout extension nobody has looked inside since it was installed. Find every one of those and that population is gone, because there is no reservoir upstream to refill it.

LICENSE TO SQUISH: MOSQUITOES is a field manual for the half of this problem you can actually finish.

Inside:

• Which mosquito you have, told by the clock rather than by markings
• The container audit: thirty places water hides on an ordinary lot, including the ones nobody checks
• Why dumping is half the job and scrubbing is the other half
• BTI, the few-dollar product that kills larvae and almost nothing else, which most people have never heard of
• The twenty dollar box fan that outperforms a four hundred dollar spray season
• Why the three-week service interval is exactly how long your own gutter takes to refill the yard
• Heartworm, and why the container audit is dog protection
• Month-by-month calendar and a five-zone regional guide

Every tactic comes with the reason it works. Every claim gets a verdict: CONFIRMED, BUSTED, or PLAUSIBLE WITH CONDITIONS. Bug zappers, citronella, mosquito-repelling plants, mosquitofish, and the two famous claims about bats and purple martins each get one, and several of the answers will annoy somebody.

No symptom lists. No treatment advice. Buckets and window screens, and then a doctor.

A flashlight, a stiff brush, a drill, and fifteen minutes a week.